Lewis was a tremendous character and a most popular figure in the Johannesburg cricket community. Though he was taking wickets with his leg breaks for the Wanderers Club in the strong first division of club cricket, doubts lingered about his ability to convert these relaxed weekend performances to the hard-nosed Currie Cup. The doubts proved justified as Lewis struggled to land the ball on the cut strip in Bulawayo and Lee Irvine, keeping for Transvaal, threw himself left and right to limit the damage. Ali Bacher removed Lewis from the attack after seven overs, 0 for 32 in the first innings and five overs, 0 for 16 in the second. When Lewis returned home he told his delightful wife that he wasn’t sure Bacher was quite the captain he was cracked up to be. ‘Kept taking me off just as I was getting going,’ he said.
Anyway, at the denouement of the match, Transvaal were clinging on for the draw. Procter, operating in tandem with the huge left-arm spinner Richie Kaschula, was ripping his off spinners out of the dry and dusty pitch. Lewis was to be last man in and was no sort of a batsman. Johnny Waite, arguably South Africa’s finest wicketkeeper-batsman—though Irvine may argue the point—was the Transvaal manager and quickly spotted the potential for disaster. He took Lewis to a tennis court behind the pavilion and asked him what his tactic would be against Procter. ‘Lap him, manager, I’ll lap him. I’ll put a big stride down the pitch and sweep every ball,’ answered the garbage-disposal man. ‘No, you bloody won’t,’ said Waite, ‘You’ll block him as if your life depended on it!’ Whereupon he began to coach Lewis in the art of defending against off spin. ‘Get forward and kick it,’ said Waite, ‘or, when it’s a touch fuller, lead only with your bat and block it. Under no circumstance go with bat and pad together.’ Waite demonstrated and then threw balls for Lewis to put the plan into practice.
They heard the crowd roar at the fall of the eighth wicket and returned to the pavilion with fifteen minutes left in the match. Waite was panicking. It was another to Procter, who now had 7, this one caught at bat-pad. ‘Ach, no, not like that boys. Come on, Lewey boetjie, try it again,’ he said, and Lewis kept at it in front of the dressing-room mirror. ‘You’ve got to take the close catchers out of the game,’ he urged himself. ‘Kick it, block it, anything, but you must survive somehow. Get forward, man.’ At that moment the ninth wicket fell. Lewis was in a corner of the dressing room still rehearsing defensive prods when Irvine said: ‘Lewey, you’re in.’
There were now six minutes remaining on the clock and three balls left in the over. Glamorgan’s Lewis dragged his heels from the dressing room and set out to save Transvaal’s bacon. ‘Lead with your bat, David,’ he muttered to himself, ‘or kick it away with your leg. Whatever you do, get forward. Bat or leg, block it or kick it but get forward, get forward David boyo, save the day.’ Head down, nervous and way out of his depth, Lewis reached the crease and looked up to ask the umpire for a guard. Before the words ‘middle and leg’ could come from his lips, there was horror. Complete horror.
Procter was 60 yards away. The wicketkeeper and slips could barely contain themselves. They had taken up position 25 yards back. There were five slips, a gully, leg gully, short leg and silly point.
‘Hello, here’s trouble,’ said Lewis to the short-leg fielder.
To himself he said, ‘Shit, I might die here.’
Procter turned at the end of his mark to unleash hell. Barely a muscle in the little Welshman’s body moved. The ball whistled past the brow of his eye before flying into the gloves of the towering Howie Gardiner behind the stumps. Procter growled. The second ball was one of those wicked inswinging yorkers that had blown away more world-class batsmen than David Lewis cared to contemplate at that moment. He leapt for his life, or his toes, and the ball, which was shooting just a fraction past leg stump, caught the back of his boot and ricocheted to the gap at square leg. The non-striker, Danny Becker, screamed at Lewis to run the single. Lewis, unable to ascertain his position or mind, found his native instinct take over as he careered to the other end in a flurry of arms, legs and fear. The once rosy Lewis complexion had turned white. Time stood still, everyone suspended in disbelief.
The Rhodesians snapped out of it in the nick of time. The clock was running down. The mighty Proc was not to be denied. He shouted at the stumper and fielders to close in. He walked back two paces and with a gently flighted off break captured the final wicket of the match. Becker, caught Kevan Barbour, bowled Procter 13. There was Castle lager and cane and Coke through the night. Procter, one of the three most devastating fast bowlers in the world at the time, had taken a career-best 9 for 71 with spin. You ain’t seen nothing like the mighty Proc.
Lewis, meanwhile, remained unbeaten. And alive.
PART 3
Talking and writing about the game
In the Channel 4 studio with Richie Benaud, our conscience and our guiding light.
CHAPTER 10
Media days
Simon Barnes once wrote that John Arlott considered cricket not a matter of life and death but ‘just a matter of life’. What a contented life it can be, well expressed in Arlott’s simple lines about watching a game at Worcester in the late 1930s:
Dozing in deck-chair’s gentle curve,
Through half-closed eyes I watched the cricket,
Knowing the sporting press would say
‘Perks bowled well on a perfect wicket.’
The writers and the poets came to the game because they recognised its bloody-mindedness every bit as much as its beauty; Arlott knew that best of anyone. It is a game of emotions and contradictions: the strong and the weak; the calm and the headstrong; the faithful and the cynical; the foolish and the wise. It is a mixture of ritual and an opportunity for art, theatre and entertainment. Nothing is more graceful than one aspect of cricket and more infuriating than another. This in itself is stimulating. Cricket consumes and spits out, which is why so many cricketers have hurried their own passing.
Thanks to the internet, it has never been easier to be a cricket writer. Anyone can write and many do. The range is stupefying, stretching across many a divide—from academics to comedians and musicians, for instance. Recently, I was sent a piece by Felix White, the guitarist in the Indie band, the Maccabees. He steps out with Florence, she of the Machine. It was good stuff, misty-eyed about his Nasser Hussain, Graham Thorpe and Mark Ramprakash of long ago.
But we must be careful. The age of the internet and of social media has led to an unparalleled output of judgement. Every slip of word or pen is magnified. On one hand, this is a good thing because it improves attention to detail, but on the other it is less good, because it leads to more cautious journalism.
Sir Neville Cardus, begetter of The Guardian’s sporting faith, once said to the novice Frank Keating, ‘You’ll enjoy sports writing, as long as you get on the front foot at every opportunity.’ Cardus headed up what Paul Stevens called ‘the holy trinity’, with John Arlott and E.W. ‘Jim’ Swanton. ‘All cricket writers have been influenced by Cardus, whether they like it or not,’ concluded Alan Gibson in his 1975 eulogy. ‘They tried to copy him or to avoid copying him.’ Cardus kept his readers ‘hovering between tears and laughter’, added Gibson.
Cardus’s obituary of Douglas Jardine in The Guardian is compulsory reading. ‘[Jardine] was a tall hard-boned personality, having none of the unction often associated in his period with cricket. His was realpolitik. He determined in the early 1930s to wrestle back the “ashes” from Australia, and to put Bradman in a reasonable, if still high, place. All the howls and winds of the world would not deter him . . . He had, off the field, a canny wit and gifts for fellowship. On the field, even a Harlequin cap did not lighten or brighten a pervading air of relentless purpose. Against Australia he played cricket to win. He was perhaps the first to lead the reaction against Edwardian gesture and romance and the humbug of a “may the best side win”.’ It is interesting that the ‘ashes’ are in quotation marks and spelt with a lower case ‘a’. This suggests that the legend of the Ashes, as we know it today, was
yet to take form.
I knew Arlott pretty well and stayed with him on Alderney. Each morning post-breakfast he emerged from the cellar with a basket of wine, six bottles carefully chosen for weather, mood and menu. His library of crammed bookshelves rose from base to pinnacle like a beehive. My eye spent hour upon hour wandering this labyrinth, my hand brushing many a spine. John wrote much as he spoke, with words that flowed like a rich and deep river. He captured simplicity and made it poetic.
Swanton was very different, both at work and play. He was ferocious about detail—‘less of the ugly word “on”, young Nicholas, more of the “leg”-side,’ he once wrote on a card to me—and, about values—‘clean flannels, Christopher, clean flannels’, he would frequently say to Chris Cowdrey, who was throwing himself around the field in T20 fashion back in the 1970s. Jim was wedded to the game, undoubtedly ambitious and hugely opinionated. At a lunch, word reached him that I had proposed the theory that a blend of the two Richards would surely make for the next best batsman after Bradman. He made his way past tables of diners to tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘I hear you think the Richards are almost as good as Bradman. I saw Hammond and believe me, Hammond has them both in a corner.’ In the course of the address at Jim’s funeral at St Stephen’s Church in Sandwich in 2000, Archbishop Runcie said: ‘Let’s face it, Jim was not a man plagued by self-doubt.’
For all this magisterial assurance, Jim was kind to newcomers, encouraging their appreciation of the game within the unimpeachable parameters he had set himself. He was good company, if frightening on the golf course, and gave one a perspective that began with watching W.G. Grace from his pram and ran to the end of the 20th century.
It is easy to forget how much of the game has gone before. The well-documented heyday of the Hambledon Club in Hampshire occurred a century before Fred ‘The Demon’ Spofforth bowled out England at the Oval in 1877. The laws of the game were first recorded in 1744 but there is enough evidence to suggest that forms of cricket were played in medieval times—a shepherd with his stick, stone and wicket gate. Cricket has baffled those not brought up with it and bored some who have. But it has charmed those who know it and now enthralls hundreds of millions of people, who watch, listen and read with ever-increasing hunger and an ever-evolving opinion.
ADELAIDE OVAL, 1994–95, 7.45 pm
The day’s play and its ensuing responsibilities were almost over, the press box was emptying. My sheet of paper was blank, bar some scribbles. I was meeting John Woodcock and John Thicknesse, two gargantuan figures of the press box, for dinner at the Adelaide Club in half an hour. Woodcock walked behind me, looked over my shoulder and said, ‘If you can’t think of a good first paragraph, dear boy, tell them what happened.’
I packed up ten minutes later and was at the club bang on time, having not written a word. Writing came later, well oiled, at around midnight. It is a wretched thing about filing from Australia that the desk in London is open all night. Woodcock said it was easier to find something to say after a drink or two. The next morning I said that what might apply to him certainly did not apply to me. The piece I wrote was nonsense. (Not again, I hear you cry!)
Another single phrase, or sentence, that resonated came from Sir Michael Parkinson, who told me that Alistair Cooke—the Cooke of Letters from America, not the Cook of 10,000 runs for England—once handed in an essay at university that he believed to be a masterpiece. ‘Murder your darlings,’ advised Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch his estimable if rather eccentric tutor. If only I had. My flowery prose, and particularly its exaggerated alliteration, was in homage to Frank Keating, whose words had captured my heart. But none of us is Frank, not close. More of that in a while. First, here is the unusual tale of how my media career came about.
A NEW YORK MINUTE
My sixteen years with the London Daily Telegraph began by fluke. In the autumn of 1991, I was invited to play two exhibition games for England against the West Indies in Toronto and New York. Twelve of us were paid £4000 each for the US trip and, though the TCCB didn’t much approve, these were the days before central contracts, so we were free agents and the four grand was handy.
I missed out in Toronto but stood in for Michael Atherton at the disused ball park on Randall’s Island in New York. I opened with Graham Gooch on a bouncy matting surface, which was hardly ideal given I had spent more than a decade in the dressing room at Hampshire telling Malcolm Marshall that I’d hook him into oblivion if we ever played against each other (I had assumed we wouldn’t). You will not be surprised to hear that he gave me the chance for two out of the first three balls in the match. The first whizzed past the grille of my helmet. The second I left alone, a tad outside off stump. The third was the same length as the first and, instead of swaying out of the way, I took it on. Silly boy. The mis-hit spiralled into the clear blue sky with Maco screaming ‘mine’, while clearing other eager West Indian fielders out of the way to take the catch himself and joyfully usher me from the field of play.
The pitch was bloody difficult. Robin Smith, Alec Stewart and David Gower made a few as I recall, but our sum total was no more than 160 in 50 overs. The West Indies won pretty comfortably, Desmond Haynes crashing it about the place. Haynes, incidentally, was one of only five of us who had made anything of baseball a couple of days earlier. After the first game at a swish stadium in Toronto, we all had a hit against a couple of local pitchers. Dessie was good, as was Viv Richards. Robin did fine too. They were the only ones to whom I’d have offered a contract. Gordon Greenidge and Allan Lamb might have been asked back for a second look. The rest of us were rubbish.
We were going to have another go in New York but it didn’t work out that way. The crowd at Randall’s Island was about 15,000, mainly expat West Indians and Wall Street boys out of London, who loved the match. Don’t let Shane Warne or Sachin Tendulkar tell you they are the pioneers of international cricket in the US. I still have the colourful poster at home, the only piece of cricket memorabilia I possess. I saved it because the match was played on my birthday and, given it is the one England team sheet on which I have been included, it will stay a while yet!
Anyway, both teams were awarded a man-of-the-match prize by the sponsors: Haynes for West Indies, Smith for England. We had agreed to split any cash but were told the award was a gift, not money, so Lamb suggested we draw straws. After common agreement and with much laughter we drew in batting order. A short straw for Gooch, pause, a long straw for Nicholas. Game over. Blimey. I opened the envelope and pulled out a letter from British Airways saying I had won a round-the-world ticket in business class. Lucky bastard. Smith’s jaw dropped: bad decision, that draw. The guys suggested I use it that coming winter and join them at the World Cup in Australia in February–March 1992. (They knew I wouldn’t be selected in the team!) No one was happier than Smith. ‘Leader,’ he said, ‘you can bowl at me in the nets.’ Right.
Wind forward three months. Chris Moody, golfer and friend, telephoned over Christmas. He said he was off to the sunshine in the new year to play four tournaments and asked what I was up to. I told him about New York. ‘Well, here’s a plan,’ he said. ‘Leave a month or so earlier and come and caddy for me in Thailand, Australia and New Zealand.’ And a plan it was.
The day before we left in mid-January, Christopher Martin-Jenkins called to ask about my trip. He said the sports editor of the Daily Telegraph was interested in taking a piece a week from life on the road with the European Tour and from inside the England dressing room. I swallowed hard and jumped at it. The sports editor, David Welch, then called to confirm the details and offer me £100 per column. I swallowed harder: space in a national broadsheet and money too.
In Thailand, at the Johnnie Walker Classic, Chris made the cut on the mark. It was a nerve-shredding experience. Golfers don’t make a cheque unless they make the cut. With courage and skill, he birdied two of the last three holes to do so. This is a hard-nosed business, a mile away from the general perception of a pro golfer’s life. So impressive w
as the way in which Chris held himself together under this severe pressure that I rushed back to the hotel room and wrote about it. I then called London and dictated to the copytakers. The next day, David Welch called to say how much he enjoyed the piece and that he would now like two a week and would pay £100 for each of them. That was January 1992. I was still writing on sport for the Telegraph sixteen years later. Then, on a cruel evening in March 2008, a new sports editor rang from his crackling car phone to say it was over. ‘We’re moving the paper in a different direction,’ he said. ‘More news, less comment.’ I was furious and I miss it. Occasionally I think I can hardly grumble: I might have drawn a short straw on Randall’s Island.
Welch was an inspirational leader. He knew and loved sport, if occasionally applying a cynical eye to the idealism of some of his writers. The Telegraph was the first paper to go to a separate sports pull-out, and to justify it he hired some of his favourite writers and looked after them well. When he stood down, his number two, Keith Perry, continued on the same path. Only when Perry was moved upstairs did the direction of the sports paper change.
There was many a slip, even more panics and occasionally utter embarrassment. Once, after a subeditor told me he had cut a whole paragraph, I shouted down the line: ‘Cut it, bloody cut it? It’s poetry.’ That had them howling at the Christmas lunch! For most of the time that the Telegraph was my master, I wrote by hand and filed by telephone to the copytakers at the desk in London. Sri Lankan names caused great confusion, as did phone lines from India. Reverse charges were accepted but not all exchanges could provide the option. In Jamshedpur, I was convinced the copy would not make its intended destination and in Ahmedabad it did not. Only with the advent of the new millennium did we learn how to send our thoughts by the early incarnations of electronic mail. I was useless with the technology, however, and still am.
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