FRANCES EDMONDS
CRICKET
XXXX
CRICKET
For my mother, Patricia
Contents
Acknowledgements
Glossary
Preface 2015
Preface
1 The ex-Prime Minister’s trousers
2 The Melbourne Cup
3 G’day from WA
4 Brisbane: some cricket, at last
5 Perth via Newcastle
6 The Big Sleep and then Adelaide
7 Canberra and Melbourne
8 Perth – the Benson and Hedges Challenge
9 The great Australian ginger-nut debacle
10 The America’s Cup
11 The Grand Slam
12 Pillow talk
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
IN AUSTRALIA
Carol Bennetto – William Heinemann
Sandy Grant – MD, William Heinemann
Eileen ‘Red’ Bond
David Michael – Bond Corporation, Australia
Jane Adams – News Corporation Ltd
Mark Hopkinson – Schroder’s Australia Ltd
Carol Aamodt – Hyatt Hotel, Sydney
Rod and Fran Lugton – William Heinemann
Queensland and Torres Strait Islander Consultative Committee (QUATSICC)
Robert Mayne et al. – Thomas Hardy & Sons Pty Ltd
Andrew ‘Spud’ Spedding (and White Crusader) – shore manager of the British challenge for the America’s Cup, Fremantle
Channel 10’s Good Morning Australia Team, |Sydney
Brendan and Pat Redden, Melbourne
Hughie and Trish Wallace-Smith, Melbourne
Bollinger Champagne
Ansett Airlines
IN ENGLAND
Mark Lucas and Virginia Allan – Fraser & Dunlop Scripts Tom Clarke – Sports Editor, The Times
Castlemaine XXXX – Allied Lyons
Johnnie Walker Whisky and Hine Cognac
Margot Richardson – Kingswood Press
Rachel Ward Lilley – Kingswood Press
Derek Wyatt – Kingswood Press
Bill Bell – Copy-editor
Kate Gay – British Airways
Francis de Souza – British Airways
David Hooper – Biddle & Co Adrian Murrell – All Sport
AND ESPECIALLY
Philippe-Henri Edmonds – whose sleeping patterns ensure that there are enough hours in the day.
Glossary
Although I have made every effort to write this diary in English, my trusty copy-editor has pointed out various instances of linguistic interference. This is no doubt due to a protracted period of exposure to the local Australian patois, ‘Stryne’.
Here, in non-alphabetical order, are a few of the most common colloquial expressions assimilated:
Stubbies
Small receptacles for beer or lager
Tinnies
Large receptacles for beer or lager
Eskies
Large receptacles for stubbies and tinnies
Akubra
Type of hat worn by a Crocodile Dundee
Crocodile Dundee
Type of man who wears an Akubra hat
Scam
Fraud
Banana benders
Queenslanders
Larrikin Yobbo
Ratted Inebriated
To chunder
To perform a ‘pavement pizza’, a ‘Technicolor yawn’: to be sick
Vegemite
Essential element of Australian staple diet: a vegetable extract-based version of Marmite
Funnelweb spider
One of Australia’s most dangerous Arachnida
Preface 2015
Consider those twin imposters, triumph and disaster, and ask yourself in all honesty who has ever truly managed to treat them both the same? As chronicled in my first diary, Another Bloody Tour, the England cricket team’s tour of the West Indies in 1986 was an unmitigated disaster. Confronted by an all-conquering West Indian team at the height of its pomp, an England team riven by cliques, fifth columnists and self-absorbed superstars disintegrated and kept on disintegrating until it almost reached the realms of particle physics. From rock-bottom, this disaffected group somehow managed to keep on excavating and to burrow themselves down to hitherto undiscovered depths. It was an ugly phenomenon to observe but the richest of seams to mine for a woman covering the shambolic sequence of events.
So what were the agencies at play? In the first instance, until the 1986 West Indies tour, media coverage of overseas tours had been confined to the relatively avuncular care of dedicated cricket correspondents. No matter how seismically significant the upheavals and shenanigans taking place off the field, such distractions were resolutely ignored as no concern of theirs. The 1986 tour, however, witnessed a sea change in this hitherto cosy convention. Driven by international media baron wars and the real-time immediacy required by new technology, a very different pack of predatory pressmen was on the prowl. Drawn mainly from the shock-horror school of tabloid journalism, news correspondents uninhibited by the omertà of long-term personal relationships with members of the England team were parachuted in and air-lifted out of the tour with a single, simple objective: to dig the dirt . . . and of that, there was plenty!
Humiliated by the media mauling meted out the previous year, the England touring team to Australia in 1987 was still understandably paranoid and prickly about the press. Added to that, whatever the state of the opposition and whatever the circumstances, an Ashes series against Australia in Australia is always a tough tour. In the heyday of cricket-playing public schools, Englishmen imbibed the Corinthian adage: ‘It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose; it’s how you play the game.’ Aussie cricketers, it seems, were never taught that lesson, not even Aussie cricketers who went to school. Aussie cricketers are hard-wired to succeed and, when it comes to Poms touring God’s Own Country, they are teeth-grittingly determined to win at all costs.
Against this decidedly unpromising backcloth, Cricket XXXX Cricket is a tale of unmitigated triumph. From the sloughs of their Caribbean despond, a media-excoriated team of England cricketers managed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and turn their fortunes around. Not only did they retain the Ashes in Australia and win the Benson & Hedges Challenge and the Benson & Hedges World Series Cup, but they also regained their self-respect, their touring team spirit and their long-lost joie de vivre. It is the stuff of MBA courses delivered in business schools all across the world. What creates a winning team? What are the hallmarks of great leadership? What, in a nutshell, is the essence of success? In Cricket XXXX Cricket, I assure you, you will find the answers to none of these questions.
There are any number of self-appointed leadership ‘gurus’ (for ‘gurus,’ read people too stupid to spell the word ‘charlatan’) who will claim to teach you the secrets of success. They will invoke everything – vision, charisma, empathy, focus, resilience – everything except the key component: luck. Napoleon’s preference for ‘lucky’ generals to run his military campaigns is well attested, but Lady Luck is rarely given her full due in the weighty tomes devoted to sporting, business and political success. For the England cricket team, it was in the first instance luck that turned a bunch of bickering losers into a motivated, focused and highly galvanised team: the luck to be playing against an Australian team in a period of transition after the retirement of some legends of the game. And yet luck, as the Roman philosopher Seneca once observed, is when preparation meets opportunity and this England squad was indeed prepared, both mentally and physically, for the rigours of this Australian tour. ‘The blow that doesn’t break you, makes you,’ so the old Spanish saying goes
, and this team’s mettle had been tested and tempered in the heat of the previous year’s Caribbean cricket cauldron. Their individual and collegiate discipline paid swift dividends in terms of success at home and that success in turn, with its attendant bonhomie and team spirit, generated further success overseas. It was a joy to witness the energy and ebullience of a team of men intent on turning their fortunes around.
Despite the successes outlined in Cricket XXXX Cricket, re-reading a diary that I wrote almost thirty years ago has been an unexpectedly disturbing experience. In terms of tragedy, two of the cricketers mentioned in this account, both friends and both terrific men, have subsequently committed suicide. This is not the place to dissect the reasons why one larger than life, loveable character and another quite brilliant scholar and writer should have been moved to take their own lives. Suffice it to say that one tragedy served to demonstrate the depression that many people, especially men, experience when they can no longer exercise the profession they love and no longer feel the warmth and fellowship of a once all-embracing, all-consuming team; the other showed the devastation wrought in the lives of those tortured, usually highly sensitive individuals who cannot or dare not come to terms with their own sexuality. The desire to feel relevant professionally and the need to be authentic personally are fundamental to our wellness and wellbeing. These are lessons that hold true whatever the area of endeavour but in sport, where professional lives are short and macho culture is so deeply embedded, the distress and dilemmas encountered are even more acute and traumatic.
In terms of sociological developments, on this tour we saw in embryonic form the burgeoning phenomenon of the celebrity superstar player, a phenomenon which has gradually morphed into its now far more toxic iteration; the unchecked super-ego. Of course, this is not a phenomenon confined exclusively to sport. Daily we witness protagonists in all areas of endeavour, from Oscar Pistorius to Dominique Strauss-Kahn to Fred ‘The Shred’ Goodwin, who share those quintessentially alpha-male characteristics historically required to reach the highest echelons and whose super-ego excesses are allowed to go unchallenged until either they self-destruct or, worse still, destroy the team, the business or the people around them. Cricket has always fielded its fair share of super-egos and there can be no doubt that, judiciously handled, these characters are game-changers. However, the vast amounts of sponsorship and appearance money that now transforms talented cricketers into multi-million pound ‘brands’ seems increasingly to challenge those individuals’ primary loyalty to the team. Furthermore, the impact of the massive influx of money for England cricketers generally combined with the concomitant overload of cricketing fixtures nowadays and a new breed of ‘Pick ’n’ Mix’ England cricketers appears to be emerging. There was a time when any cricketer would metaphorically kill for the honour of a wearing an England blazer. Today’s players, however, seem increasingly inclined to leave overseas tours and pop home for any number of personal and domestic reasons. Those Corinthian spirits motivated by the ribbon’d coat, let alone nothing more tangible than the captain’s encouraging hand, seem to belong to an ever dwindling band.
Allied to the increased abundance of spondulicks now splashing around for any England cricketer, there is one further development that has made me revisit the arguments I so vigorously deployed thirty years ago. In the eighties, due to the relatively modest incomes of the majority of professional cricketers, the number of WAGs on tour was minimal and manageable and I truly believed that such a numerically restricted WAG element not only did nothing to disrupt the harmony of the team but positively reinforced it. Nowadays, tours have become logistical nightmares for management as significant others (in some cases even wives) plus an attendant phalanx of babies, nannies, chief cooks, bottle washers, Old Uncle Tom Cobleys and all etc pile on to the touring cricketing juggernaut. It is a painful dilemma, especially given today’s non-stop cricketing schedule, but it perhaps now time to determine whether the intrusion of entire young families with their inevitable disruption is a welcome adjunct or a dangerous distraction to any professional touring team.
Yes, cricket is a microcosm in which life in all its aspects is played out under the media microscope. In my first cricket diary, Another Bloody Tour, I witnessed the fall-out of a failing England team imploding in the West Indies. Now, as you read Cricket XXXX Cricket, I hope that you feel the fun, the focus and the massively good fellowship that informed a resurrected England team in Oz. Triumph vs Disaster? I have yet to meet the cricketer who could treat them both the same.
Frances Edmonds
London, 2015
Preface
Never ever believe anything you read in the newspapers. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. On occasion I write for them.
Take conference interpreting, for example. That certainly is not all it is cracked up to be. It is not all duty-free Hermès scarves and Chanel No. 5; jet-setting around the world making boring, banal, superficial and ill-informed politicians sound riveting, innovative, outstanding and brill . . . or, indeed, from time to time, vice versa.
No. Sometimes you come across the real thing, the people who really know what they are talking about, the experts. And inevitably, when you do, they are talking about something incomprehensibly esoteric such as plasma physics, and when they are, it is in exotic locations such as a laboratory in Culham, not a million miles away from such exciting railway stations as Didcot.
Not that nuclear fusion is not a fascinating topic, on the contrary. And not that the relative merits of ion cyclotron resonance heating, lower hybrid resonance heating, electron cyclotron resonance heating, Alfvén-wave heating, turbulent heating and adiabatic heating are not subjects worthy of protracted ponder on a cold, misty October afternoon. Dear me, no.
It may, perhaps, have had more to do with the cumulative effect of a pharmaceutical conference in Portsmouth the week prior, epitomised in awfulness by a Spaniard with a cleft palate, semi-intelligible in five European Community languages, telling us all about benzodiazepine in his own highly individualistic brand of French. That, and the conference a fortnight before in Milan, an unspeakable meeting on pre-impregnated gas-pressure assisted cables, dominated by an unstoppable flow of manic Italians – that was probably what did it.
My thoughts turned to the workers on the other side of the world: to the old man, stretched out on a beach on the Gold Coast, exhausted after a heavy thirty minutes turning his arm over in the nets.
I rang my travel agent in London, and booked myself a seat on the next flight to Australia.
1 / The ex-Prime Minister’s trousers
I must admit to being somewhat miffed. No, not somewhat. That is far too pusillanimous an adverb to convey my current state of displeasure. Extremely.
You have all, no doubt, heard the story of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’. Of course you have. Even people educated in Queensland have heard the story of the Emperor’s new clothes. Well, my arrival in Australia has been totally upstaged by a better one than that: two television and three radio interviews cancelled – and all because of the saga of ‘The Ex-Prime Minister’s Old Trousers’.
Former Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm (‘Rectitude’ used to be my middle name) Fraser has been very busy on the after-dinner speaking circuit since his elevation to Chairman of the Eminent Persons’ Group. The EPG is an eclectic selection of sometime somebodies and current busybodies, mandated by Commonwealth leaders to report on the South African problem in general and apartheid in particular. Australia, with its erstwhile whites-only immigration policy and a healthy track record in wiping out its own indigenous Aboriginal population, was the obvious country to field a chairperson for such an egregious body. Malcolm was back, if not centre-stage, then at least in the wings of international diplomacy.
It was therefore a trifle unfortunate, after one such speaking assignment in Memphis, Tennessee, that Mr Fraser should somehow lose his trousers, his wallet and his diplomatic passport during a nocturnal sojourn at the Admiral
Benbow Motel. The Admiral Benbow Motel, according to Memphis Tennessee Tourist Board Officials more inured to dealing with Elvis Presley groupies wetting their pants rather than ex-Prime Ministers losing them, is a perfectly – almost totally – respectable hotel. Not quite the sort of establishment in which you would expect an eminent person to lay his weary wallet and diplomatic passport, but the right side of kosher at least. What does seem extremely odd about the place is that it would not appear to provide telephones in the bedrooms. Why on earth, otherwise, would the debagged ex-premier arrive in eminenta persona at the reception desk to report the loss, with only a towel to swathe his lower regions – hardly a step designed to ward off unwelcome publicity from the probing eyes of the world’s media? Another mystery is why Mr Fraser would sign himself into the good Admiral’s residence as one ‘Joan Jones’. ‘We thought Joan was the Australian way of spelling John,’ obfuscated the motel’s receptionist nicely. With such a thorough grasp of international diplomacy, maybe she should be chairing the Eminent Persons’ Group.
Australian marketing men recognise a good wheeze when they see one, and a Melbourne men’s underwear company is already advertising extra-durable, guaranteed against holes, executive underpants, just in case you ever get caught with your pants down. Whatever happened to good taste? At all events, the episode does not appear to have ruined the elder statesman’s hitherto unsullied reputation. On the contrary, informed pundits who believe that Malcolm’s stiff-and-starchy never-put-a-foot-wrong image won him little sympathy Down Under are now convinced that this rather louche little episode could herald a complete renaissance of his political career. Yes, folks, Cecil Parkinson would assuredly have been better off in Australia, and so, for that matter, am I. The end of October in England, when the clocks go back, and the nights close in at five o’clock, is the most depressing time of the year, and five months in the Antipodean sunshine seems no bad way to spend an English winter. I arrived in Adelaide on 31 October, three weeks after the England cricket team had left our green and pleasant land in an all-out effort to continue the glorious summer game in warmer climes, to retain the Ashes, and to break the spell of disasters which has dogged them since their disastrous tour of the West Indies in early 1986. A home season spent losing to the Indians and New Zealanders has done little to revive confidence, or restore morale, and all-rounder Ian Botham’s subsequent exclusion from the team on drugs offences was, perhaps excessively, sorely felt.
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