One reason I find it impossible to recreate my original, all-engrossing fervour for cricket is that there is currently so much of it to watch. In these days of multiple sports channels, the men who run cricket (and that’s not sexist – it is still men) make most of their money from selling the broadcast rights to international games. In other words, it pays to have your national team playing as much as possible. The channels also expect value for their money, and the upshot is we have lots of tournaments, and plenty of games.
This ought to be a win-win situation for a cricket fan like me. You want to give me more of the thing I love? Yes, please. Dish it out and keep it coming. But with every added fixture, the results become incrementally less significant. You can’t keep yourself in a froth of excitement when your team seem to be on the telly as regularly as The One Show. And so I’ve become increasingly blasé about the games; it’s hard to keep up with all the action unless you make it your full-time occupation.
Twenty years ago, an English summer comprised six Test matches at most, and a smattering of one-day games. Every game was an event, and every moment that could be spent following the live action was savoured. That’s why Test Match Special’s promise of ‘ball-by-ball coverage’ sounded so richly appealing (and not, as one of my teenage friends once told me, like a threat). It’s why I would start anticipating a Test match at least a fortnight before. When those games were through you might have to wait half a year to see your team play again. There were no other international games available to watch in the meantime.
Today, I feel guilty every time I see an Indian Premier League game is showing, because I know I’m not going to watch it. Who has the time? Back then, I know I’d have given anything for a Twenty20 all-star league, or the chance to watch highlights from a South Africa v New Zealand Test in Paarl. The longueurs without cricket were excruciating and unfathomable. I’d consider myself in agony, and curse the authorities for their lazy scheduling: more proof that you can never really make a sports fan happy.
In 1993, following England’s win in the final Test against Australia, there was . . . nothing. Literally, nothing. It was the end of August, and the England team weren’t scheduled to play their next match until February. The cricket season was drawing to a close, so I couldn’t even follow domestic games in the newspaper. I’d experienced my first hit of sporting ecstasy, and someone had immediately cut my supply. It only made me think about cricket all the more.
I filled the dead time with imagination and fixation. As a 14-year-old girl, I had accumulated a certain number of soft toys and teddy bears, and these were now named in honour of my new heroes, mostly the bowlers who had taken wickets at The Oval. A tartan Loch Ness monster that my grandmother had bought me on a trip to Scotland was dubbed Angus Fraser, after the bowler who had been drafted into the England team at the last moment then stolen the show. A pale bear with an expression of permanent worry was named for the fragile-looking spin bowler Peter Such. A slightly scruffier, wirier bear was invested with the name of a Welsh player who, as it turned out, never played another Test match. I still have it today, and it makes me happy to think that I am the only person in the world who habitually says goodnight to a teddy called Steve Watkin.
It wasn’t all flights of fancy; I also spent those months applying myself rigorously to my education. September marked the start of my GCSE year, and my bookshelf began to swell with new purchases. My favourite was What is a Googly?, a helpfully illustrated guide to the laws and the more technical side of the game, which I worked through like a textbook, stopping to quiz myself on each chapter. A book called If the Cap Fits, containing short pen portraits of every England player since the Second World War, became my encyclopaedia. If Mum mentioned a name I’d not heard before – Fred Titmus, Tony Greig, M. J. K. Smith – I’d run to pull it down from the shelf and read their entry.
I had always loved the sensation of knowing stuff. The pleasure wasn’t in the act of learning, but the way a piece of pre-digested knowledge would pop to the front of my mind, unasked for, at the perfect moment, like a magic trick. I put this down to my dad. He was the kind of person who, if he couldn’t answer a question, would immediately look up the answer in a book. He couldn’t watch a film without pointing out anachronisms and inaccuracies, and he drove my mother to despair derailing conversations with fascinating but entirely tangential facts. I had inherited his hungry brain, and cricket was a sport that seemed to offer infinite new information to hoard.
While learning had always come easily, the social side of my education felt more of a struggle. I went to an academically competitive school and constantly compared myself with others, which made me a bit of a worrier. But I was no introvert – I was, in fact, rather loud and over-eager, and my adolescent hormones unleashed a tendency to intensity. Forget the Hollywood bromance: for hidden affections and tortured emotions, nothing can beat the teen-girl ‘best friend’ phenomenon, whose politics are byzantine, and whose passions are all-consuming.
I would throw myself, full-hearted, into these exclusive relationships. A best friend was a constant companion; you waited for them before class, and made plans to meet them at the lockers straight after. Leaving for morning assembly with someone else, or failing to save a seat for them at lunch, could lead to violent arguments, deep wounds and social anarchy. When the inevitable break-up came, I would cry for days. A teacher once found me in the locker room, having bawled myself into a state of dehydration. She had to send me to the matron for fluids.
By the time I turned 15 I had burned through a number of best friends. But now that we were living in Luton, I had to start taking the train to school, and that introduced me to a new set of girls: the half-dozen whose parents dropped them off far too early, and who killed time by playing cards until the bell went. They let me join their game, which continued one morning to the next, the scores kept as scrupulously as if we were high rollers in Monte Carlo. My new friends were happy to let me burble about cricket while we studied our hands. They weren’t looking for deep emotional chats or everlasting bonds of friendship; they were looking for trumps. So we played cards, and I poured my excess feeling into my newfound love of cricket, which they tolerated and gently ignored.
While I was enjoying this new start, Michael Atherton was overhauling the identity of the England cricket team. Their next challenge was a tour of the West Indies, and a month after the Oval victory the squad that would fly to the Caribbean was announced. It was a team full of fresh young faces. Atherton had insisted on a ‘clean break’ from the past and the last remnants of my mum’s batting heroes – Mike Gatting, David Gower, Allan Lamb – had been told that their services were no longer required. ‘We’ve had some older players in the side in the last few years,’ Atherton explained to the gathered press, ‘and we haven’t been winning.’
As someone with very little sense of cricketing history and no past to be nostalgic about, I was the kind of thoughtless, ruthless kid who cheered their exclusion. Having just turned 15, I knew that youth was better than age. Irvine Welsh had just published Trainspotting, there was a 46-year-old president in the White House, and Tupac and the Wu-Tang Clan were cementing arguably the greatest year in hip-hop’s history. I noticed none of these things, as I was about as iconoclastic as a Charles & Di wedding mug. But I did know that England’s cricket team were embarking on a new era, and it was a privilege to be alive at such a time.
Among the tour party were a number of players I had never heard of before. Some, like Nasser Hussain, would go on to play crucial roles in the development of English cricket. Others, like Alan Igglesden, would disappear into obscurity. Then there was Phil Tufnell, whose every mention tantalised with trouble. ‘Often moody’ and ‘difficult to handle’ were typical epithets. Frequent reference was made to his drinking and smoking, and a third bad habit of arguing with umpires. ‘Phil Tufnell has been cast as England’s enfant terrible and at times he appears determined to live up to his reputation,’ read his entry in If the Cap Fits. It was accompanied by a headshot of a long-haired young man giving the camera a who-do-you-think-you-are? scowl.
I neither drank nor smoked. My family went to church together each Sunday, and I had little interest in the opposite sex unless they were characters in a 19th-century novel. I was not the kind of girl to fall for a bad boy’s dubious allure but, as we all know, those are just the girls who do. Tuffers, as he was known, was instantly fascinating to me. I wanted to know more about him, so I asked my mum. Her fondly liberal opinion was that Tufnell had great potential, but had been mishandled and misunderstood by previous England management. ‘If anyone can get the best out of him, Atherton can,’ she remarked.
In my mind I began to picture Tufnell as an errant older brother (I was too innocent to imagine anyone 12 years older than me as a boyfriend), the kind who needed the help of a loving, patient, ingenious younger sister to get him out of occasionally life-threatening scrapes. I created little fantasies to this effect: in one storyline, he owed money to a mafia gang who were going to cut off his fingers if he didn’t pay. I would pull off an audacious rescue, delivering a couple of pithy one-liners along the way, then deliver him back to Atherton in time for the next day’s Test match. Atherton, impressed with my resourcefulness, quick-thinking and sense of calm in a crisis, would then ask me to join the team as a personnel manager, a sort of horse whisperer to England’s most difficult players. And that is how we would win back the Ashes.
Tufnell’s playing career was to be full of incident, much of it off the pitch. He missed curfews, training, and even a couple of matches; there were on-field tantrums, bitter rows with soon-to-be-ex-wives, and a furious father-in-law who hit Tufnell in the face with a brick. And yet his colleagues spoke warmly, if despairingly, of him – his poor behaviour seemed less the result of viciousness than of thoughtlessness or laziness, or both.
These days, Tufnell’s roguish appeal extends far beyond fans of nineties cricket. Anyone who has watched a bit of mainstream telly will know him as that cheeky chappy who has flirted with Sue Barker on A Question of Sport, danced with Katya on Strictly Come Dancing, and been crowned ‘king of the jungle’ on I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! Like most winners of that show, he triumphed by appearing the most casual and unambitious of the contestants – just a bloke who liked a beer, a nap and a laugh. It’s an endearing attitude on reality TV, although you can imagine it being less so in the context of team sport.
He has never, in his new guise as a television personality, been a preserver of reputation – in fact, Tufnell seems to revel in telling stories against himself. So if anyone is going to tell me the truth about what life was like in the England team of the 1990s, I reckon it is him. His colourful private life was well documented, and he never learned to hide his emotions on the pitch. It is easy to feel I know him well already.
I contact his agent and, after some diary wrangling, am told that Tufnell can meet me on a bank holiday Monday in a pub near his home. It turns out to be an old, gabled building, a rambling country pub with timber beams and a plethora of nooks, crannies and snugs. I inveigle myself into one of these, a sort of three-sided booth, and at our scheduled meeting time, around 1 p.m., Tufnell appears in front of it. He is wearing black Nike tracksuit bottoms, a dark T-shirt and a black puffer jacket, and there is a lost look on his face which, taken in combination with his wardrobe, suggests he might only just have rolled out of bed.
This impression grows as he sits down to join me. His greeting is friendly but vague, as if he can’t quite remember how he came to be here, and I can hear a couple of pieces of gravel clinking around when he speaks. He stretches and sighs and admits that he has been making the most of the three-day weekend. ‘It’s just a licence to go and get smashed,’ he says. ‘Which I suppose is fair enough, innit? Life’s too bloody short not to, when you’ve got Monday off, if you know what I mean.’
I am thrilled. My first encounter with Phil Tufnell, and he has a genuine hangover. He squints at the menu quietly for a long while, then asks for a sausage sandwich. ‘And a bottle of Laurent-Perrier!’ he giggles, before settling for Peroni. The partying isn’t, it turns out, the only reason he seems a bit tender. Tufnell has also burst his eardrum. ‘It’s like someone’s punched me in the ear,’ he says. ‘I was sitting there filming A Question of Sport and all of a sudden there was all blood coming down the ear. And I went: “Shit! My brain’s falling out of my head! I’m dying!” And everyone was very shocked and then they went, “Oh no, you’ve burst your eardrum.” And no one felt sorry for me any more.’
Telling the story seems to wake Tufnell up a bit. He asks which other cricketers I’ve been speaking to: just Alec Stewart, I reply. ‘To be fair to Alec, he was probably the only professional cricketer in the side. Ha, ha, ha! You want to know what was going on in the nineties? Good question. What the hell was going on?’ He chuckles, and the pieces of gravel chink together in the back of his throat.
He doesn’t want me to get the wrong idea: the team had trained hard, and played hard, and enjoyed each other’s company. ‘But there was never a feeling of . . . all moving towards a goal. It was just turn up, play, and go home. It was all ad hoc. There were different physios, different players, different people in charge. No one seemed to know where they were.’
The sausage sandwich, when it arrives, proves the stuff of life; Tufnell grows chatty and open. ‘I loved playing for England, but when I first got picked, I was disappointed in a funny sort of way. I thought there was going to be this next step in my development . . . I was like a sponge,’ he says, lingering on the word, squeezing an imaginary one in his hand. ‘I thought: “Right, something’s going to happen, someone’s going to tell me something that I didn’t know and I’m going to become the best bowler in the world.” And I sat down and everyone went: “Do you fancy going out to dinner?” ’ He leaves a beat – he is a practised storyteller. ‘And I went, “All right, then.” It’s a big piss-up, like it is back home. You’ve just got a different badge on the front of your shirt.’
I think back to the first flush of my romance with the England team. The autumn of 1993 was a honeymoon for both of us. I basked in the glow of England’s one recent win, and pictured a happy life together, while they spent a week in the actual sun, doing warm-weather training in the Algarve. With no games being played, my faith in them grew, unfettered by reality.
In December they gathered at the National Sports Centre in Lilleshall, Shropshire, for a two-week boot camp, and were pictured in the papers doing exercises in slightly naff tracksuits. England’s cricketers had never prepared so thoroughly for an overseas tour, and even though the bookies were still quoting them at 14/1 to beat West Indies, this newfound professionalism brought with it an overwhelming sense of optimism. For onlookers like me, at any rate. Tufnell’s memories of it are rather different.
‘It was the worst two weeks of my life.’ His lip curls at the memory of cross-country runs, and team-building activities. The players slept in tiny rooms no bigger, says Tufnell, than the booth we are sitting in. ‘It was absolutely freezing cold and snowing. What a great preparation that was, to go to the Caribbean. Whoever thought of that idea should be shot.’ He sounds surprisingly angry about a fortnight of training that happened 20 years ago. ‘All we wanted to do was go down the pub. We were already going to go away for four months. “I know what we’ll do, we’ll just take them away from their kids and their families for a further two weeks just before they go, to go orienteering in the snow and sit in a cell.” How to get 15 guys really pissed off before they go on tour.’
I want to remonstrate. He can’t complain about a team’s lack of professionalism, then moan that his managers made him go to practice instead of drinking. Then I remember that at the same time that Tufnell was being forced to go on cross-country runs, I was faking period pains to get out of PE. Perhaps we are more alike than I realised.
Either way, faced with playing West Indies, you needed all the practice you could get. Mum had been educating me about the Caribbean’s proud and terrifying cricketing heritage and their tradition of bowling so fast that a batsman was lucky if he even saw the ball that cannoned towards his head. She told stories of black eyes and broken ribs that appealed to the love of the physically gruesome that all adolescents possess. When she came to Michael Holding, the man they used to call ‘Whispering Death’, my first question was: ‘Did he actually kill anyone?’
Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh, the giants who would be terrorising England, were left to my imagination. The BBC did not broadcast England matches overseas. There was a way to watch England play during the winter, but it involved paying money to a company called British Sky Broadcasting that people like my parents deeply disapproved of. Plus, it was considered rather vulgar to have a satellite dish installed on the outside of your house. The dishes were indeed large and ugly, but I think my parents’ objection was more metaphysical – in their minds, wanting more television than the four channels universally available was a sign of stupidity. (This position has not stopped them, in their later years, becoming slaves to the Alibi channel and ITV Encore.)
So there was no chance of satellite TV, and the only stereo in the house was the apparently lead-lined system installed in our cold, uncomfortable dining room. I chose instead to follow the cricket on Ceefax. This caused problems with my sister, who never seemed to appreciate how suddenly a match might turn, and did not enjoy my need for regular updates. A typical scene would develop:
Me: (pressing the Ceefax button on the remote control, rendering the screen completely black) ‘I just need to check the score.’
Kate: ‘Stop it! I’m trying to watch Byker Grove!’
Me: (holding remote strategically out of reach) ‘But there’ll have been another over by now. Someone might have got out.’
Kate: (grabbing at remote) ‘But I was here first!’
Me: (refusing to relinquish remote) ‘You don’t understand. This is a crucial session! I need to see the score!’
(Dialogue becomes wordless grunts as Kate and I wrestle the remote to the floor.)
Kate: ‘Mum! She’s making me miss the programme!’
Me: ‘She’s making me miss the cricket!’
Yes, my first England tour was tough.
It began well enough. The first Test started just as my imagination had scripted it, with a century stand from Atherton and Stewart seeing England through the onslaught from Ambrose and Walsh. And then the West Indies went off-script: one of their back-up bowlers, a young guy called Kenny Benjamin, ran through the batting line-up like a knife through Nutella. England never recovered.
On the final morning of the game, I turned on the news to discover that Walsh had bowled a spell so deadly it verged on the psychopathic. The footage showed Devon Malcolm, England’s number 11, being hit again and again. Malcolm was no batsman, and Walsh was using him as target practice. Aiming to injure a batsman is not strictly illegal in cricket, but the umpires are expected to protect those like Malcolm who are unable to defend themselves. On this occasion, they had decided to stand back and enjoy the show.
Malcolm was lucky to escape with bruises; the deliveries Walsh was sending down could have broken bone. Mum was shocked by the umpiring; I was just shocked. When I’d read about the danger posed by fast bowling, the word had always sounded largely metaphorical. Watching Malcolm under assault, I saw a new side to the game I’d adopted, one that was brutal, physical and ruthless.
Never underestimate the threat of violence working on a romantic teenage mind. I was your typical teenage pacifist: war poetry made me cry, I was permanently in fear of nuclear Armageddon, and I couldn’t understand why political crises couldn’t all be resolved with a little chat and a nice cup of tea. But seeing England’s players under attack awoke a belligerence I never knew I had.
It is crass, of course, to compare sport to war, and sportsmen to soldiers; we know that their situations and sacrifices do not compare. But the narrative was just too powerful for a girl like me (reader of Byron, watcher of Sharpe) to resist. The sports reports spoke of men ‘under fire’ from a ‘blistering barrage’; pictures showed England batsmen contorted at the crease, dodging invisible bullets. I cloaked their deeds in the mantle of heroic warfare, and felt every wicket like a mother reading the lists of casualties from the front. When Atherton scored a century in the second Test, while his comrades fell around him for single-figure scores, it had the doomed valour of a solo cavalry charge. England went 2–0 down.
In our nook in the pub, Tufnell is finding it hard to recall the West Indies tour, probably because he wasn’t picked in the first three Test matches. ‘That was a mistake,’ he says, ‘’cos that’d mean I’d just go on the piss for three weeks.’ In the third Test in Trinidad he was twelfth man, the substitute role that traditionally involves carrying drinks or equipment out to the players, and taking the field in the case of injury. In Tufnell’s case, it was a perfect opportunity to indulge in his favourite hobby, sleeping.
While Tufnell catnapped, England did something unexpected – they established a lead. It was the first time on tour that they had managed to outscore the West Indies. They bowled well, too. Not perfectly – West Indies’ lower-order batsmen put in a resilient performance – but their final target was perfectly achievable. My thoughts ran to victory, then sprinted on past it. With a win in Trinidad, they would carry their confidence into the next game – and if they won that one, they’d square the series. England had clearly turned the tide.
That’s how it seemed, four and a half thousand miles away, in a teenager’s bedroom in Bedfordshire. Tufnell, meanwhile, was in the dressing-room, handing out drinks to his friends as they prepared to return to the field. One hundred and ninety four runs was all that was needed. ‘I can remember going round, looking at the batters. And their eyes were all like . . .’ he makes saucer eyes ‘. . . and I thought to myself, “Ooh, they don’t fancy it.” I could just feel something was wrong.’
Still, it was only 194 runs. In a team of 11, that’s fewer than 18 runs per player.
It was 4.03 p.m. when England began their final innings in Trinidad – 9.03 p.m. in Luton. I had recently discovered a large and ancient radio that had belonged to my grandmother, the only thing in the house (other than the titanic stereo in the dining room) that received longwave. It was too old to have an earphones socket so, to muffle the sound, this piece of salvage was snuggled in bed next to me, poking me with its sharp corners and importing a great quantity of dust on to my sheets.
Atherton took guard and prepared to face the first ball. Two sounds followed – a giant thud, and a terrifying, collective yell that sprang out of that ancient radio like something from Edgar Allan Poe. I can still feel the adrenalin shock and the despair of knowing, from that sound alone, that Atherton was out. A few minutes later Mark Ramprakash ran himself out, and England were 2 for 1.
As I lay in bed, despair turning to nausea, Tufnell was having a snooze in the St John Ambulance tent beneath the stands. He had heard the roars from the crowd over the music from his headphones, but chosen to ignore it. ‘I’ve thought, “That’s two down.” But this is one of my favourite tracks, I’m enjoying this. And then two seconds later, there’s another “Yaaaaaaay!”’ England were 5 for 3. ‘They just started going down like fucking ninepins.’ What followed was one of the most humiliating episodes in England cricketing history. Ambrose, the silent giant of the West Indies team, tore through England’s batting in fewer than 20 overs.
Tufnell acts out the scene in the dressing-room with a manic energy, immersed in the memory. ‘Everyone’s scrambling . . . it’s the first time I’ve seen five England batsmen all padded up, their helmets on, chest pads on, all in a line, like parachutists waiting to get out the fucking aeroplane . . . “C’mon, next one, go!” . . .’ He trails off, a look of Kurtzian horror in his eye. ‘Chaos . . . chaos . . . chaos . . . chaos . . .’
I had listened to England’s implosion, my duvet over my head, my insides clammy. The radio, ugly harbinger of doom, now had complete hold over me: I was paralysed, incapable of switching it off. This, I thought, must have been what it was like for my gran during the Blitz, or for my mum as the Cuban missile crisis unfolded. Or maybe it was just what people experienced when watching scary movies – I’d never tried one – but worse, surely, because this was actually happening.
When the game ended early the next day, England had been bowled out for 46. That wasn’t a low score, or even a terrible one: it was shameful and unheard of. Such a result might have been comical in a village match, but here the humiliation was too deep, too raw, for humour. I devoted an entire poster to it – I guess I found the process cathartic, expunging the horror by Pritt-sticking it on to a moody magenta background. ‘Requiem for Atherton’s Army,’ ran one doomy headline; at the time it captured my own elegiac state, although now it just sounds creepy. Underneath, a photograph showed members of the England team lined up at the post-match ceremony, arms uniformly folded, staring at the ground in the manner of chastised schoolboys. I diagnosed the expressions on their faces as shellshock, but it was probably embarrassment.
It said something about the quality of my family life that this Test match was one of the most traumatic experiences of my sheltered life to date. My sister and I were extremely lucky – our home was happy and stable. Even when my parents had money troubles, like the ones that had forced us to move, our own lives continued in blissful ignorance of the fact. It was a marked contrast to Tufnell’s tumultuous story, which I watched play out, like a long-running soap, in the years that followed. After the Caribbean tour his partner Jane left him, taking their daughter with her, and Tufnell was fined for slapping her across the face.
I remember his court appearance, because the Evening Standard my dad brought home carried a rare picture of Tufnell wearing a suit. The suit was fawn coloured, and he still managed to look slovenly in it, which probably didn’t help his case. My mum, probably wanting to shield me from the ugly reality of domestic violence, did not make a fuss about the story. I didn’t want to believe that Tufnell had hit his wife, but he had admitted it, and the news left me with a pang of vicarious guilt, which I quickly ignored. The fact that Jane’s father had followed up with a brick to Tufnell’s face seemed to deliver a cartoonish comeuppance and deposit the affair into the safe realm of farce.
There were plenty more plot twists to come in Tufnell’s private life, but none stopped me wanting him in the side. He was an aggressive, wicket-seeking bowler, which marked him out in an era of colourless, unthreatening English spinners. Perversely, for someone whose behaviour was so wild, his deliveries were not. Tufnell’s dainty skip to the crease, his long fringe flapping about his forehead, masked his arm’s dangerous intention; as his wrist flicked forward, the ball would fly out faster, perhaps, than you expected, yet hanging in the air a little longer than it had a right to.
I was his vehement advocate, and railed with frustration when Peter Such or Ian Salisbury were picked ahead of him. Sure, he added nothing with the bat, and his fielding could actually damage a side’s efforts, thanks to the fact he was able to drop the most basic of catches, but these deficiencies only made me like him more. He was unpredictable in every regard, and in an era when England’s results were only too foreseeable, that was a big part of his appeal. A bit of mischief-making seemed exactly what you needed in a team looking to turn the tables on its betters.
And when he was good, he was very, very good. For all his wildness off the pitch, Tufnell had the composure and consistency to frustrate batsmen with his left-arm spin, and the wiles to outthink them. There was no better proof than the final Ashes Test of 1997, a series he had been left out of all summer. His fourth ball of the match was to Matthew Elliott, a delivery tossed so provokingly high that Elliott was halfway through a mighty drive, already picturing the boundary boards’ tremble, when the ball jumped out of the way of his bat and rattled the stumps behind him.
After that, Tufnell bowled without rest for 34 and a half overs, picking off the Australians one by one. He made the ball turn and bounce and dance in the air, and the ground responded with little puffs of dust each time he worked his magic. By the close of the innings, he had taken seven wickets and got England back into the game; by the end of the match, he had 11 and had won it for them. ‘Only about the third time I managed to out-bowl Shane Warne in my fucking career,’ he says, with a slightly caustic laugh. ‘Pain in the arse he was. Fucking Shane Warne.’
Tufnell was cursed with living in an era when all spin bowlers were measured against Warne. And there were comparisons, not in their careers so much as their personal lives. Spinners often have personalities that tend towards the anarchic, the rule-breaking, the occasionally unhinged. And, like Warne, Tufnell has always shrugged his off with a comic turn.
There’s no better example than the time he suffered a breakdown during an Ashes tour and trashed a Perth hotel room. The story has been told in the autobiographies of everyone who witnessed it: Atherton was summoned to Tufnell’s room to find him sobbing on the edge of his bed amid a carnage of broken furniture, and Tufnell was taken, in the middle of the night, to a psychiatric unit. The version Tufnell tells today has ludicrous embellishments: he escapes from the ward chased by orderlies, hides in bushes and leaps over fences, his hospital gown flapping open to reveal his naked bottom.
Beyond these almost certainly fictional details the tale returns to the verifiable: Tufnell flagged down a passing taxi and got a lift back to his hotel, where the team management were staging a crisis conference. He sauntered in with a can of lager in one hand and a cigarette in the other. ‘I’m terribly sorry, I’ve got it out my system. Can we just forget about all this now? See you at the ground for warm-ups? Thanks very much!’ And he walked out. ‘Oh, it was funny!’ cries Tufnell. I laugh, of course – but was it funny? It sounds uncomfortably close to tragedy to me. ‘I thought to myself, “Why am I getting upset about some woman?” And run the risk of not playing for my country? An England cap’s worth more than a woman, I’m afraid.’
Just like that, his effervescence vanishes. The suddenness of his mood change throws me; there is something of the Victorian gothic about it. He slumps forward, talking to his beer, as if it isn’t a second pint over lunch but the flavourless dregs of closing time, and I am the barman, listening to the late-night complaints of an unhappy husband. Memories, hot and bitter, flood out unchecked. I can’t tell if I’ve touched a nerve, or if his feelings are always this close to the surface. Is this what it was like to share a dressing-room with him?
He says his piece; the episode passes. Awkwardly casting about for something to say, I tell him that, being a teenager, a lot of his off-field scandals were too adult for me to understand. ‘Well, there you go,’ he says. ‘They were quite adult for me at the time as well. All I wanted to do was play cricket but I kept seeming to find myself in all these scrapes.’ He looks genuinely bewildered. ‘They just kept coming, day after day . . .’
It would seem fair to say that Tufnell struggles to appreciate how his actions affect others. At one point he tells me a story about touring with Atherton. They were good friends, he says, despite their very different characters (‘I’d be drinking whisky out of the mini-bar and he’d be reading War and Peace’) and one night during a Test Tufnell had a party in the room next door to Atherton’s. ‘About four in the morning we’re still making lots of noise, and he knocked on the door in his pyjamas, and said, “Phil, I’ve got to open the batting for England tomorrow. Can you please turn the music down?”’ Tufnell lets rip his infectious cackle; the thing that tickles him most is the thought of Atherton waiting until 4 a.m. to confront him. ‘Just come and tell me at half-eleven and I’d have turned the music down then, mate! But perhaps that was my mindlessness. Because I didn’t have to open the batting.’
Back in 1994, I was convinced that Atherton was the man to give Tufnell the counselling and direction he needed. After all, the last Cambridge-educated man to captain England, Mike Brearley, had done the same for another famous bad boy, and look at Ian Botham’s legend now. My mother revered Brearley, the first man whose acute understanding of the human mind had earned him both a psychology degree and an Ashes victory. He had known how to handle egos and superegos, and I fully expected Atherton to perform the same Jungian feats on his players.
After the catastrophe in Trinidad, the team might have welcomed a mass lobotomy. Sitting on the sore end of a 3–0 scoreline, the series already lost, England officially had no chance at the Bridgetown Oval. The ground was known as ‘Fortress Kensington’ because the West Indies had not lost there in 59 years. The England manager, Keith Fletcher, told the press that a draw would count as a victory. And when England’s total passed 46 in their first innings, the crowd gave a cheer.
So, how to account for what happened next? How to explain the fact that, whenever I returned to the radio, Alec Stewart was still batting? Why, when I switched on Ceefax, did the scorecard blink with pleasure at the news of another West Indies wicket fallen? With no more dignity to lose, England had finally combined every crumb of grit and flash of flair that they possessed. By the fifth day they had turned the tables on their Trinidad tormentors. It seemed poetic to me, that the wicket which brought them victory should be that of chief torturer Curtly Ambrose.
The next day, adverts for Tetley Bitter, the team’s shirt sponsor, showed the England players dowsing Stewart in beer, and I was inebriated by proxy. Tufnell’s abiding memories are of the crowd, which was filled with British holidaymakers. He had been standing near the boundary rope, surrounded by supporters, when the final wicket fell. ‘The place just went mental,’ he said. ‘I got scooped up in this surge of people and carried back to the pavilion.’
When Tufnell remembers the games he played in, he often mentions the supporters, but not in the mechanical manner that Wimbledon winners thank the crowd, nor in the disingenuous way footballers talk of their loyalty to the fans. ‘I think the crowds realised we were good players but that it was a bit of a shambles,’ he says at one point. He loved going out drinking with the fans – both the holidaymakers and the locals – when he was on tour. ‘It was like a roadshow!’ he said. ‘It was like The X Factor coming to town!’ And it was sometimes like National Lampoon’s Vacation, too. ‘I’d be hysterical at some of the situations we got ourselves in.’
I try to marry the giggling mischief-maker with the tortured soul who had passed under a dark shadow half an hour earlier. And it dawns on me why I was so forgiving of Tufnell throughout his career. He was sulky and moody; he was also subject to uncontainable waves of enthusiasm. He was needy for affection, and desperate to please, but inconsiderate of others; he felt misunderstood. He just wanted to have fun; he just wanted to sleep. I didn’t need Mike Brearley to diagnose Tufnell, I could do it myself. He was a teenager.
No captain ever managed to tame Tufnell, and none seemed to fully trust him. He was in and out of the side more times than any other player in the nineties. For all mine and my mother’s predictions, nurturing someone like Tufnell didn’t come naturally to Atherton, a young man himself, with no immediate desire to raise children. I have always wondered if Tufnell felt any guilt at all for his behaviour and, as it turns out, Atherton is the only man he seems to regret ‘sodding about’, as he puts it. ‘I did give him a hard time, probably. At this point I would perhaps like to apologise to Michael. But I always tried my utmost for him on the field. I never didn’t fancy a bowl for him.’
The implication is that, for other captains, he might have refused to bowl at all. Tufnell has managed to turn a moment of contrition into something at once blame-dodging and incriminating. It’s infuriating, but it’s honest. How honest he is with himself – how much he holds himself to account for the way his life had panned out – isn’t for me to divine.
He is happy, that much is clear. He loves his wife Dawn, and I wonder if, as a TV personality, he has found a career that suits him even better than cricket. He doesn’t agree. As we leave the pub and he turns to walk up the hill that leads back to his house, he pauses to reiterate how much he has enjoyed his England years. He says he hopes he hasn’t sounded bitter, because he loved the camaraderie, and has shared his life with ‘a great group of lads’.
I feel like I’ve already met three Tufnells in the past couple of hours, and here is another – serious and sincere, protective of his friends. His television persona doesn’t seem so much a construct now as Tufnell at his best, his most free. And I sense, once again, what my 14-year-old self valued in Tufnell. He made his sport fun. He brought it to life. Whether he was taking wickets or kicking his hat in frustration – whether he was fielding or misfielding – he was incapable of not being himself.