Trinidad is a rat-ass country. If you don’t believe me, then ask the West Indian opening batsman, Barbadian Desmond Haynes. This is what he said, according to the Trinidadian rag Sports Update. I do, however, have it on the excellent authority of the Birmingham Evening Mail cricket correspondent, Jack Bannister, that Desmond is feeling horribly misquoted. ‘Fleapit’ was apparently the exact expression employed.
Here we are again, immured in our Trinidad Hilton warren. Phil and I are located next to the West Indian team room, and I spend a lot of time listening with a wine glass to the wall, or hanging surreptitiously over the balcony in Mata Hari attempts to uncover their diabolical tactics. Unfortunately, when they all speak together in some incomprehensible Windian patois, it is very difficult to decipher their next demonic stratagem. There also seems to be a lot of buoyant, Black Power, hand-slapping salutes, the reverberations of which are doing absolutely no good whatsoever to the wall or the wine glass.
It is difficult to speak too lowly of the Hilton. Notwithstanding the young maître d’hôtel, a blond, stony-faced Aryan of aristocratic Prussian manners and clipped Teutonic ways, Germanic concepts of service and discipline do not quite percolate through to the local Trinis in the kitchen. Even the mild-mannered and mellifluous John Woodcock (The Times) was obliged to pen a letter of complaint on ‘The Old Thunderer’ headed writing paper to object to the three hour delay in service in the restaurant. (‘Trinidad’s finest’ to quote the not entirely objective Hilton brochure). Objective and courteous as ever, however, ‘Wooders’ went on to thank the management for the munificent generosity of the freebie Hilton Easter egg!
I also spend a lot of time avoiding the Reuter’s Venezuelan photographer. Poor darling was originally sent from Caracas to cover the Second Test, and Tony Brown introduced him to me last time we were in Trinidad. He neither speaks nor writes a single word of English, and knows absolutely nothing about cricket. In this, at least, he is on a par with many of the press covering the tour. He fell on me like a long-lost compatriot, totally deprived as he had been of any conversation or information in Spanish. Tony (‘Antonio’) had given him a list of names (nombres y apellidos) of the England cricket team, but our man from Caracas had presumably experienced some difficulty in correlating names with faces. I should not be in the least surprised if photographs of Edmond Philipps [sic], looking remarkably like Allan Lamb at the crease have been winging their way across the world, together with shots of Paul Downtown [sic] purveying a top-class brand of off-spin. It all seems pretty consistent with the degree of misinformation which has been prevalent this trip. For the Fourth Test, unfortunately, my Venezuelan friend has decided to apprise himself further of the finer nuances of the game, and keeps accosting me with the cricket columns of The Times and the Guardian, demanding on-the-spot sight translations into the language of Cervantes. I have genuinely tried to do my best (despite the patent lacunae in the idiom) to convey the concepts of ‘uneven bounce’ and ‘turning wickets’. When we got to ‘swinging balls’, however, my mind turned unaccountably to ‘bullfighting’, and pleading a migraine I retired to bed.
A pall of uncertainty is still hanging over the tour. Graham Gooch is known to have given a letter to the chairman of selectors, Peter May, on his departure from Barbados, apparently outlining his position with respect to the Deputy Prime Minister of Antigua, Lester Bird. As early as 30 January 1986, Lester Bird issued a statement in response to comments made by the Antiguan Education and Sports Minister, Reuben Harris. To any half-aware observer, the whole affair was nothing more than an internecine domestic squabble, the equivalent of a storm in a Caribbean banana republic teacup. Bird had simply stated that in his personal capacity, he would not be attending any of the fixtures in Antigua. He laid into Harris for confusing the issue by erroneously alleging that he, Bird, had been speaking in his capacity as Foreign Minister, and not merely as an individual. Bird then launched into a fairly ad hominem attack on the Sports and Education Minister for accusing him of ‘undermining his [Harris’] sports machinery and programme.’ Mr Bird took greatest exception in his statement to the fact that Mr Harris ‘casts the efforts of the entire Antigua Labour Party Government as “his”’. I think from these few snippets, you can readily appreciate the level of discussion. Mr Harris then immediately and inevitably convened a press conference to launch a counter attack on Mr Bird. And so, it would seem, they pass their time away in Antigua: two not absolutely internationally significant politicians in an island with the population of Southend trying to score debating points over one another.
Indeed, anyone who cared to read the statement made by Lester Bird aired on Cana Radio on Thursday 30 January 1986, with anything other than a totally paranoid, egocentric and navel-contemplating eye, would have been obliged to concede that it was nothing more nor less than that. Bird even went so far as to concede: ‘The Gleneagles Agreement . . . may bind my government and me as a minister to accept the England team in this country. But it does not bind me as an individual to watch them play cricket. While I will not attend the Test match in Antigua, I do not dictate to anyone what they should do. I act by my conscience, others must act by theirs. It is not my wish that anyone should intimidate or threaten the safety of the players.’
It was all relatively innocuous stuff. Graham Gooch, however, was apparently angered by Bird criticising his Rebel tour of South Africa in 1982. As Lester Bird stated in the same relatively low-key statement: ‘I cannot accept that a simple retraction of a statement is sufficient to wash away the comfort that players in the English side have given to a regime that brutalises people.’
All this had clearly been festering in Gooch’s mind since the team’s visit to Antigua for England’s territorial match against the Leewards in early February. The running sore of putatively injured pride and hard-done-by attitude was also kept well and truly open by the not entirely responsible antics of one member of the press, which unnecessarily wound Gooch up. Gooch, who had always steadfastly, if somewhat naively, claimed that he never wanted to be involved in politics, and that in going to South Africa he only wanted to ply his trade and play his cricket, was now rather inconsistently involved in doing exactly the opposite. Everyone else, however, agreed that it was the exclusive task of the TCCB and the management to do the statement making. The players were out there quite simply, as Gooch had so fervently maintained in South Africa, to play cricket. Gooch, therefore, was persuaded to remain silent, and the problem, so it was generally thought, had been neatly and definitively circumvented.
People, however, had underestimated Graham Gooch. The qualities so admirable in an opening batsman – tenacity, stubbornness, the will to fight, never-give-up, and dig-in-the-heels – became sadly more in evidence off the field than on. After the Third Test in Barbados, neither Peter May, nor the British High Commissioner of Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda, Sir Giles Bullard, had any success in convincing Gooch that it was neither expedient nor sensible to continue a battle of words with Lester Bird. Gooch by this stage was apparently threatening not to grace Antigua with his presence in the Fifth Test. It apparently never occurred to Graham in this man-made, self-inflicted political maelstrom, that the best way to silence any critics and to gather sympathy and support for himself and his cause was to go out and score a few much needed centuries in the next two tests.
Many people failed to see why Gooch could not just focus his energies and attentions on the obvious task, and get on with the game. It had been clear right from the beginning of the tour that Gooch found very little pleasure in being in the West Indies and such vibes do have a distressing tendency to permeate a team. It is worthwhile contemplating whether lesser players of more positive attitude are not far greater and more successful assets to a side. Sadly such reflections on this tour do not apply to Graham Gooch alone.
Meanwhile, in amongst all the political posturing and ‘sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll’ revelations, there has been some cricket. Nothing much to write home about, admittedly, which is why most correspondents here don’t, as this peripatetic cricketing nightmare gradually accumulates far more coverage in the news and feature columns than in the sports pages of the British press.
The Fourth One Day International was played in front of a capacity 25,000 Easter Monday crowd. Chanting outside the Queen’s Park Oval Ground was confined to the usual handful of placard-toting anti-apartheid demonstrators. One particularly Neanderthal exponent clipped me on the shoulder and, face distorted with generic hate, denounced me as a ‘white, racist, blood-sucking vampire’. I was genuinely upset, and for a few hours, unutterably miserable. I really had thought my tan was coming on rather well.
The mood inside the ground was by contrast gay and festive. Youngsters selling cool drinks, Rasta men selling peanuts, and pedlars and higglers purveying luminous red chicken, coagulated rice and peas all added to the holiday mood. I was not entirely fortunate in having a Yorkshireman of the omniscient variety sitting immediately behind me, his voice almost as loud as the fabric of his trousers. The basic problem was that he, for one, knew what the ‘trouble’ was.
Trouble was that there weren’t enough Yorkshiremen in t’ England side. Trouble was Geoffrey Boycott weren’t openin’ t’ battin’. Trouble was these youngsters had never been down t’ pits. Trouble was they didn’t know what hard work was all about. Trouble was they’d never had the discipline of National Service. Trouble was they didn’t know the meaning of net practice. Trouble was they were battin’ too slow. Trouble was this Tim Robinson weren’t playin’ enough shots. Trouble was this Tim Robinson ought to teach these West Indian blighters a lesson, accelerate t’ run-rate, and cart them all over t’ park.
Tim Robinson was actually playing a very diligent, extremely responsible, sheet-anchor Boycottian innings for fifty-five. It was not exactly the cavalier, heave-ho, Beefy Botham smash-around that so empties bars and beer tents all over the cricketing world, but it was quite definitely the sort of performance many of the cricket correspondents had been demanding from the England opener since the beginning of the tour.
Our Yorkshireman was still not pleased.
‘Trouble with this bloody innings . . .’
Eventually I snapped. Turning around I surveyed the little man with that Medusa-Edmonds look which has so informed my dealings with obnoxious air hostesses, shop assistants and wine waiters all over the world.
‘Unus homo,’ I informed him, archly, ‘Unus homo, cunctando, restituit rem.’ (With apologies to real classicists: ‘One man, by blocking, saved the entire innings.’)
His piggy eyes met my icy glare.
‘Bloody southerner,’ he said. ‘Trouble with southerners . . .’
England failed even to make 200, despite some good swashbuckling stuff from I. T. Botham. The playing sequence on the scoreboard showed Peter Willey ahead of Botham, but quick runs were necessary at that late stage, and Beefy, if anyone, is generally the man to deliver the goods.
A hum of excitement buzzed through the crowd as the bare-headed highlights bounced their way almost arrogantly to the crease. The West Indian crowd love a showman, and Beefy is certainly that. There is an air of hushed expectancy, whenever he approaches the wicket, and despite his poor performances thus far on the tour, everybody knows that he, above all other England cricketers, is capable of turning virtually any match around – of snatching success from the very jaws of defeat. His most acerbic detractors are often those who are disappointed that every game cannot be England versus the Australians at Headingley in 1981, and the mantle of superstardom seems currently to be lying very heavy on those broad shoulders. If ever a man seemed in need of a straight, down-to-earth, unhyped, no-axe-to-grind, decent friend right now, it is probably Ian Botham.
A goodish slash by Botham was not enough to save England that day, since there were simply not enough runs on the board for our bowlers to have half a chance of making a contest out of it. Phil (playing in his first One Day International this trip) missed a relatively simple catch off Botham, who was genuinely and sullenly angry. A few minutes later Phil, totally atypically, misfielded a ball which continued on to the boundary. Beefy refused to pick it up. You misfield it, his countenance and demeanour were obviously suggesting, you bloody well go and retrieve it.
At the drinks interval, I noticed David Gower specifically go over to Phil, and pat him on the shoulder, as much as to say, ‘Come off it old man, it happens to everybody.’ He is a man of such affable kindness, and genuine humanity, the captain. His indefatigable good temper and cheerfulness is the obverse of a coin that a lot of the bandwagon critics are billing as vapid leadership, and lack of authority. Certainly David is not in the Brian Clough mould when it comes to ordering men about. He himself is such a natural, elegant and stylish player that he has probably never had to think too hard about his own game in particular, and the entire game in general. He has been relatively lucky over the past few years in that the England team has been facing weaker opposition, and therefore the much vaunted Art of Captaincy has never had to be called upon. His greatest sin is that he continues to treat his players as adults, and his much berated policy of optional nets this tour has been predicated on the not unreasonable belief that professional cricketers are big boys who should know what is best for themselves.
Unfortunately for David he is now captaining a team which looks sadly fragmented and clique-ridden after a fairly disastrous Caribbean run. Three Tests to nil down he must be seen to be making an effort, no matter how bad the practice facilities, no matter how fatuous the proceedings. Mike Brearley, universally acclaimed as one of England’s greatest captains, was not slow to realise the value of good public relations and clever psychology. David would probably do well to take a few leaves out of his book in terms of press manipulation and image creation. Certainly when it came to image, Mike Brearley would have left Saatchi and Saatchi standing, but David is of a simpler and more straightforward ilk. It is sadly beginning to look as if his laissez-faire attitude to the captaincy has brought the chairman of selectors guillotine to within centimetres of that curly, blond, insouciant head, and Peter May is making no secret of his pro-Gatting proclivities. Mike Gatting, as observers as astute as Bob Willis have not been slow to notice, has had quite a bit of spare time to lobby on his own behalf. Sporting his myriad injuries with a much lauded degree of macho dignity he has nevertheless managed to escape with his professional reputation intact. He has yet to play in a Test match, and has therefore not had the opportunity to dent the heroic kudos of being brutally injured in Kingston. The team has taken to calling him Cliff Richard. It is not so difficult they feel, to be full of zest, vitality, and team ethics when far from slogging it out in the middle, you are merely on a Summer Holiday.
The best, if not the only, way to while away an entire day watching cricket is to tune in to the local radio station. Tony Cozier, the only readily intelligible West Indian commentator, had unfortunately decided to take a rest from the Fourth One Day International, and had wisely remained behind in Barbados, taking a few days’ well-earned break holed up in his beach house. I, for one, find it rather difficult to understand many of the other home-grown mutter-merchants, though to be fair, the locals seem to encounter no difficulties in comprehension.
We are fortunate out here to have Henry ‘Blowers’ Blofeld as a little light relief. In his early commentating days for the Beeb, Blowers would apparently stick religiously and resolutely to tedious details of the pitch and the game in progress. Nowadays, it is almost impossible to divert his flow into comments on such lacklustre phenomena. His is a seamless continuum of trivial leitmotifs, an art form only tangentially connected with the cricket. Pigeons, paper bags, pretty girls, white parasols, butterflies, flags fluttering in the breeze, and aeroplanes are all recurrent themes in his very amusing and loquacious commentary. Cricket purists may well maintain scathingly that he is developing into a self-parody, but I on the contrary take great delight in his constant old Etonian banter.
‘I say, old thing, is that an aeroplane? Any idea what sort? Yes, I can see for myself it’s Pan Am. I mean, what sort? A DC-9? Oh, how splendid. Listeners, we have a DC-9 flying over the ground at the moment, which seems to presage a fair degree of aerial activity this morning . . . And I say! There is a jolly pretty young lady over there in the Dos Santos stand. Awfully attractive orange trouser suit . . . No, I’m sorry, it appears to be a gentleman.’ (Stifled giggles, off.) ‘Lord, I hope he’s not listening . . .’
Of course. Blowers is missing the entire BBC commentary box gang: Trevor Bailey, Tony Lewis, Fred Trueman, Don Mosey (‘The Alderman’), Brian Johnston (‘Johnners’) et al. I adore them all with the passion most people reserve for bad soap. Cricket, at least in that box, finds its rightfully minimal significance in the cosmic arrangement of things:
‘I say. Blowers, here we have a chocolate cake kindly sent in by Mrs Algernon Cleft-Palate-Smythe of St George’s Hill, Weybridge. Really super chocolate cake. Tony, I believe you had a bit of luck at the golf match the other day. A dozen pairs of tights in the raffle. What on earth will you be doing with those?’ (Dirty guffaws off-mic.) ‘But this chocolate cake really is super. And Mrs Cleft-Palate-Smythe has written us a letter . . . oh, a really wonderful letter, wanting to know what sort of a wife is Mrs Phil Edmonds. Poor man has been wearing the same pullover with a big brown mark at the back – oh, and there goes Gooch, caught in the gully – for the past four Test matches! I say, Fred! Is that your second slice?
‘And who have we got coming in now? Yes, the bowler’s Holding, the batsman’s Willey . . .’ (Apoplectic tittering, and five minutes of broadcasting silence.)
How on earth would we be able to follow what is going on without them?
Whilst the commentary box was really rather amiably jolly that day at Queen’s Park Oval, the press box ab contrario was busily psyching itself into yet more venomous outrage. Fielding on the boundary, Ian Botham was not exactly staving off the crowd’s attentions. Multicoloured groupettes (small groupies, who have not yet reached the age of puberty) not entirely discouraged in their mission, were constantly pestering him for autographs and snapshots. He strolled along the boundary, his sunhat perched jauntily askew on his peroxide perm, did a few curtain calls and accepted dubious drinks. It was all fairly good-humoured stuff, and despite the circus act he never missed a single ball, fielded brilliantly, and stopped some certain boundaries. The vipers in the press pit, however, were blowing telephonic gaskets, and the captain was eventually obliged to come over to remonstrate jovially with him, tapping him on the wrists. Shudders from the press box could be felt on the Richter scale. The very tabloids who went into such hysterical hyperbolics in 1981 when Botham won the Ashes (and Brearley took the credit); the very journalists who were talking about a knighthood, a ‘grace and favour’ home, and all but an appropriation in the Civil List, are the very same folk who now want the fallen hero keelhauled. The press create the myth, and the press undermine the myth. The harm they do to the subjects of their oscillating favour and furore is of little concern to them. Poor Botham! Publicity is such a double-edged sword. Initially it was gratuitously foisted upon him. Latterly it has been consciously sought. Presently it is destroying him.
It is beginning to look as if future England touring teams would be well advised to dispense with the redundant luxury of an assistant manager, and to hire a roving libel lawyer instead. Professional cricketers are now extremely legalistic in their approach to the press, and perhaps are beginning to see successful libel suits as a useful adjunct to their salaries. Graham Gooch received a reputed £25,000 by way of damages for comments made about him over the South African Rebel affair.
Such libel as there putatively was fades into total insignificance compared with the unadulterated vitriol dispensed in some of the local Trinidadian papers. A leader in the Trinidad Express of Monday 31 March 1986, for example, began with the not entirely constructive admonition of ‘Go jump in a lake, Gooch’. The piece continued in highly emotive vein about Gooch ‘and his fellow Judases who claimed their pieces of silver off the backs of the South African blacks’. All good, rabble-rousing, demagogic stuff. The author, unfortunately for the credulity of his arguments, then proceeded to exhibit his own true colours:
‘There was no indication by performances that either Les Taylor or Greg Thomas should have been selected above such as Norman Cowans and David Lawrence. Their only claim to fame was their journey to the darkest side of the Dark Continent.’
These, I’m afraid, are racialist words, the words of a person who will patently never rest until the entire England team is of similar hue to himself. To allege that the TCCB (whose infinite sagacity is at times, admittedly, a tiny bit suspect) is specifically picking players because they have been to South Africa is excessive even by Trinidadian standards. Rather than take offence at such arrant nonsense, Gooch should only be too pleased that the perpetrators are clearly fanatics.
‘Why on earth does Goochy mind what this character says?’ I asked Tony Brown one afternoon, addressing the looming Antigua problem. ‘And, in any event, what does it matter what the Deputy Prime Minister of anywhere says? Who’s the Prime Minister?’
Tony looked at me with the sardonic smile of a man who by now knows more than he ever wanted to know about West Indian politics and politicians.
‘The Prime Minister,’ said Tony, slowly unfolding the secrets of the Antiguan Masonic Lodge, ‘The Prime Minister, I’m afraid, is Lester’s dad.’
It took the Eton-and-Cambridge perspective of people like Henry Blofeld to put old Lester in his correct historic context. Blithely strutting the stage of international politics in 1986, Lester Bird was, in 1981, the West Indian Board of Control representative for the Leeward Islands. In 1981 we had, of course, ‘The Jackman Affair’. The Prime Minister of Guyana, Forbes Burnham, took exception to England substitute Robin Jackman and his ‘South African connections’. Forbes’ case was incontrovertibly watertight: Jackman’s wife was definitely South African, and Jackman was definitely connected to her. England’s taciturn manager, A. C. Smith, would have no truck with such posturing. He virtually had a Dunkirk-like escape planned from the beaches, though sadly for the world’s press this eventually proved redundant. There was even talk that Lester was (at that time) an aspiring Test commentator, and the last thing he wanted to see was his embryonic career on the broadcasting waves blown by any fool politicians. He was the first to ensure that the Antigua Test went on regardless, and that the England players were welcomed to the island with open arms.
If a week is a long time in British politics, then surely five years must be an eternity in the Caribbean variety. Lester seems to have done a complete volte-face. We shall have to wait and see how many people have espoused his cause when we reach Antigua.
This tour really is degenerating into an amalgam of petty politics and spurious sensationalism. The beleaguered Botham is busily issuing yet another writ, against yet another Sunday tabloid, for yet another allegation suggesting that he no longer wants to play for England. He has just been more or less obliged to part company with his agent, the flamboyant eccentric millionaire Tim Hudson, after some story appeared in the Daily Star alleging that Hudson at a Malibu party said something along the lines of, ‘Of course Botham takes drugs. Doesn’t everyone?’
‘Oh, God,’ winced Matthew Engel, staring lugubriously into his luncheon gazpacho in the Trinidad Hilton Coffee Shop when he heard the reported Hudson gaffe. ‘Now they’re stabbing Botham in the front.’
Hudson denied the quotations. Many people were not unhappy to see the Hudson–Botham relationship broken, least of all, by press accounts, Botham’s father-in-law, who apparently suggested opening celebratory bottles of champagne. It was widely felt, in cricketing circles, that Hudson had filled Ian’s head with promises of megabucks, superstardom and Hollywood. In the process, Botham’s cricket, the one and only attribute that has made him a marketable commodity and a genuine hero, has taken a nosedive.
For the first time in a long time, Botham’s place in the Fourth Test in Trinidad was in jeopardy. It also looked very much as if Peter May had delivered a very serious, if totally negative, message to the captain: at all events, avoid a repetition of 1984; avoid another blackwash. The English team therefore played an extra batsman to the exclusion of the specialist bowler and Phil, the left-arm spinner, was twelfth man. He was not exactly pleased, but there again, neither was Richard Ellison, nor Les Taylor, who has hardly been played this tour.
It is so glaringly obvious to any casual observer with the merest smattering of common sense that this team is suffering from a highly detrimental breakdown in communications. After a brilliant piece of bowling in the One Day International way back in Jamaica, Les Taylor has been left inexplicably on the sidelines. Richard Ellison, generally accepted as the best quick bowler we have, was staggered not even to make the twelve. Phil, more philosophical but equally cheesed off, surmised that England were going for a draw with ‘defeatist fucking tactics’ (as they are apparently called in expert professional cricketing parlance). The problem here is that nobody bothers to explain to players what is happening and why. If team meetings were used to make people comprehend the group objective, then possibly players, even non-playing players, might be more able and willing to contribute to its ultimate fulfilment. There is nothing more pernicious than disgruntled, omitted players wondering what on earth they have done wrong. Chances are, they haven’t done anything wrong, especially not the bowlers. The trouble on this tour is that the overall balance of the side has been disrupted by the ever-increasingly frenetic efforts to compensate for the shoddy batting, which the consequently omitted specialist bowlers quite obviously resent.
Well, ‘the defeatist fucking tactics’ were not exactly crowned with success, and the West Indies won the match by ten wickets. It seems to me, as a total ingénue, that if the batting does come off, then the extra batsman is redundant and you need your extra bowler to bowl the opposition out: and if the batting disintegrates, then your extra batsman is probably worth only another five or six runs in any event. Such thinking however is obviously far too simplistic amongst all these Mensa cricket minds, and so I shall keep it quite properly to myself.
The inevitable happened. Greg Thomas, our Welsh-English fast bowler had a nightmare match, but was unfortunately obliged to continue bowling since the captain only had three other top-class bowlers to choose from (Botham, Emburey and Foster). Botham, perhaps for once realising that his career as a Test cricketer – for reasons on and off the field – was on the line, exhibited a few glimmering sparks of that old Botham fire, and, as most successful bowler, collected five wickets and was second-best batsman.
The best England batsman, and the most pedagogic example to the rest of the ailing team, was Worcestershire’s David Smith. David is a huge man of few words; a redhead with a reputation for aggression against fast bowlers, and indeed against anyone who rouses his normally phlegmatic temper. There is a very endearing kindliness about him with respect to members of the ‘weaker sex’. After some particularly raucous and generally unpleasant behaviour perpetrated by just one unstoppable member of the team on the transfer bus from Trinidad airport to the Hilton for the Second Test, David Smith apologised to me for his colleague’s behaviour on behalf of the entire team. I, to tell the truth, was very touched. Phil has always said to me (and of course there is reason in what he says) that if a wife travels with the team, she must not expect any behavioural concessions to be made to accommodate her presence and I certainly never expect any. In his quiet, unfussy sort of way however, David felt sorry and embarrassed for me, and in so doing showed himself to be a gentleman of far finer sensitivities than my own dear husband.
I digress. David Smith’s philosophy for success is simple. It is based on the very tenets which the West Indian pace-bowlers seem to have embraced with such devastating results. The secret is channelled hate. Off the field everybody may well be very matey, but on the field, facing guys who would gladly dislodge your cranium from the top of your spinal cord in intimidatory efforts to collect your wicket, the only answer is to match hate with hate. Observers have commented sweetly on how nice it is to see Ian Botham at the wicket, having a laugh and a jape with his best chum and the godfather of his first son, Viv Richards. ‘Isn’t it great to see such friendly rivalry?’ they ask, so crucially missing the point. The point is that the only way to stay with the West Indians is to match fire with fire, hostility with hostility, aggression with aggression. As Australian wicketkeeper Rodney Marsh apparently once told a nervously chatting Derek Randall, as he tried hopelessly to engage the impervious Antipodean in conversational banter at the crease: ‘What d’you think this is? A fucking garden party?’ (They really do have such a way with words, these colonials.)
There is only one winner in these Botham–Richards exchanges of wit and repartee, and it is certainly not I. T. Botham (whose concentration could be far better focused on the job in hand). Indeed, when it comes to the crunch, Viv Richards does not have the look of a jolly conversationalist when he’s at the crease . . .
A lot more aggression, then, and far fewer Oscar performances, it would seem, is the recipe for an immediate improvement in the side. By Oscar performances, I do not, unfortunately mean award-winning centuries. No. These performances are well-orchestrated RADA-worthy histrionics, prize exhibitions of agony and pain, premature apologies for subsequent dismissal, or perhaps merely ostentatious complaints from the middle about the uneven bounce of the pitch. It never ceases to amaze me that a ball which hits, say, Graham Gooch or Wilf Slack on the hand seems to have an exponentially more painful effect on, for example, Ian Botham. Wilf and Graham will just take off the glove, give the hand a quick matter-of-fact, no-fuss rub, and, concentration unbroken, return to face the music. Sometimes you see them mouth the odd word of polite recrimination – ‘Oh gosh!’, or ‘Dear me’ can occasionally be lip-read – but obdurately they continue with their innings.
One cannot help but wonder whether Beefy Botham on the contrary has not had one MGM screen test too many. Indubitably painful though a knock on the glove must be, it is highly doubtful whether ten minutes’ ranting and wailing, in the best classical Greek chorus tradition, has a terribly good psychological effect on the next poor blighter padded up. According to Phil, who was absolutely incensed over such an occurrence one evening, the ham acting and vituperative complaints about the pitch and the bowling that spill over into the dressing room upon dismissal, do far more than any West Indian pace-man to psyche our next poor batsman out.
‘I just wouldn’t allow it!’ said Phil dogmatically.
It is, of course, a constant source of frustration and annoyance to Phil, one of the more thinking and articulate members of the team (God knows, it isn’t difficult), that he is in no position of authority to decide what is or is not allowed. At the moment, or so it would seem, anything, but anything, goes.