Before the big matches began I might start my season at Lord’s: on an early April morning, especially if the weather was kind, it was a little world in itself, isolated from London traffic by high walls and trees just coming into leaf. Then I might move a week later to Hove, where the pink cherry blossom would already be leaning away from the breeze but not yet ripped apart by wind or burnt brown by summer; the sea, just down the hill, more scented and imagined than seen; homely chatter from the blue and white deckchairs: ‘Another fifty off from these two and we could win this yet, you know.’
So it would go through the season. Trent Bridge, perhaps, in June: an international ground, yet still a cricket ground, local, friendly, quietly proud of a long heritage; well developed but dominated still by the greensward itself, with its rich turf and broad dark and light stripes. Or the small-ground intimacy of Basingstoke to follow in August; white tents crammed close to the boundary, flint and stone walls marking one inviting boundary; an ancient church beyond; players and their watchers close enough to touch; the big match come to town, as once it came to the villages in days when players were much smaller but no less heroic. Then they wore top hats, but it is helmets now.
All too soon, it would be Lord’s again, in September: old players run-stealing in the hope of new contracts; young ones striving to make their mark; leaves beginning to stain the ground and long winter months ahead.
In the best county clubs, especially those based away from big cities, the first team is merely the focal point of a unified whole. At Sussex, especially during their run of success from 2000 or so onwards, there was a genuine feeling that everyone was part of the family: the ground staff, the stewards, the scorecard lady, even the loyal band of regular spectators. County Championship cricket in particular remains a game played for the most part away from the glare of television cameras; earnest and passionate but companionable too; not, utterly, money obsessed.
No television meant that newspaper reports in the three main broadsheet newspapers of the time were a special privilege to write and usually a pleasure to read. A band of agency reporters round the country specialised in the facts while the tabloid writers, gifted wordsmiths though they may have been, had to look for a personality or a news story. The lucky few, however, had the space to interpret, analyse, observe and speculate. In BBC days my county cricket reporting and commentating had been mainly confined to Saturdays. Now, before, after and sometimes during an international programme that was less heavy than today, there was time to see matches from start to finish and in between to have a beer and dinner with friends or even in the precious company of a good book.
For some time all the talk in official cricket circles has been of cutting down the amount of County Championship cricket. The executives and board of the ECB, for ever putting marketing and money-making before the production of the best possible England-qualified cricketers, refuse to listen properly to the views of players and coaches, frequently wasting their money instead on professional research, most of it loaded to favour the views of those fair-weather followers of cricket who seldom actually watch the game. Another such exercise was expected to recommend a smaller first division and fewer first-class matches overall from 2013. To my mind that would be a mistake, for a number of reasons that include the uncertainty of the weather and the danger that festival cricket, the very essence of the county game, will become even rarer than it already is.
Oh, my Harrogate and my Buxton long ago! There was a time, and still is in the more enlightened counties, when the county coming to town was a big event, anticipated long in advance, relished while the cricket was in progress and reviewed with pleasure months later. Sometimes such games are never forgotten, such as the one started and finished after a thunderstorm on the extraordinary opening day of the Tunbridge Wells Week in 1960.
Kent and Worcester began battle at 11.30 am, Kent reaching 80 for four by lunch before being bowled out for 187 at 3.40. The left-handed Peter Jones made 73, very nearly as many as Worcestershire managed in their two innings of 25 and 61. Witnesses reported small craters appearing when the ball pitched, much to the liking of Dave Halfyard and Alan Brown, who took nine cheap wickets each. By 7.15 it was all over.
Every now and then freak events occur and pitches are not what they should be for top-class cricketers. They are the exceptions to the general rule that county cricket is better tuned to small, intimate grounds than it is to echoing caverns like The Oval or Edgbaston, places that come alive on the big international occasion but that too often seem glum and empty when they play host to the homespun atmosphere of the County Championship game.
County cricket flourishes, absorbs and excites in places such as Arundel and Abergavenny, Bath and Burton-on-Trent, Colchester and Colwyn Bay, Dover and Dudley, Eastbourne and Ebbw Vale. I shall not try to get to the end of the alphabet but there would not be many letters missing if I did. Many of the places that no longer get the chance to stage county cricket have quite beautiful grounds and those that remain generally do so still.
The cricket is characterised by a strong local spirit and players and spectators are brought close together to the benefit of both. The surroundings, seldom far from a church or pub or both, are invariably adorned by old and beautiful trees that help the ball to swing, not to mention shortish boundaries that encourage bats to do the same. Good weather usually guarantees good sized crowds and a precious amalgam of tension and relaxation.
The reason for the decrease in the number of festival games is simple. All counties have more or less developed their main grounds, at an accelerated rate in recent years. Some of them have got into serious financial difficulties as a result. Once there has been investment at a county’s headquarters it makes sense to use that ground as often as the number of pitches will sensibly allow. Overheads are less expensive that way.
The strong counter arguments are that festival matches spread the gospel around the county, encourage local cricketers and cricket-watchers, make everyone feel part of the family of the game and give a focal point to the season for those clubs on whose grounds the county team comes to play. I know from the experience of my local club, Horsham, how much that means to the members, many of whom get involved year after year in the nitty-gritty of preparing the pitches, making the teas, watering the flower-baskets, erecting the tents that go up round the ground and making arrangements for dealing with an invasion of cars and spectators.
More than this, matches on out-grounds can still be great events for the town in question. I suppose I have been to one of these games without seeing the local Mayor in attendance on one or other of the days but if so I cannot remember it. There always seems to be a large black car with a pennant billowing out from the bonnet parked in a position of prominence with a driver at the ready (albeit with an eye and a half on the cricket) to whisk the VIP back to the town hall after a good lunch.
At one match in Wales, in the glorious parkland setting of Pontypridd one wet day after play had been called off for the day and everyone had gone home, I witnessed a strange example of civic pride. The Mayor solemnly went ahead with his prepared lunchtime speech from the balcony, like Hitler at the Nuremberg rally, even though the field in front of him was empty and the handful of people who could actually hear him were all standing behind him, most of them invited journalists anxious not to waste the chance of a drink and some free sandwiches. By the same token the Mayor was not going to miss the opportunity to make a speech. ‘I’ve prepared it boy, so I’m damned well going to give it’ was the unspoken message.
It was, I believe, at another mining town, Ebbw Vale, that Emrys Davies called his partner Gilbert Parkhouse across at the end of the over to tell him that he had just tapped down the pitch with his bat on a length and had a nasty surprise. ‘I could have sworn I heard someone answering back below’ he said.
The fact is that if towns, cricket clubs and county executives all co-operate and appreciate the possibilities of festival games, they will benefit everyone con
cerned. The local economy gets a boost from an influx of visitors, helping shops, pubs, hotels and garages amongst others; the county gets a guaranteed profit if its officials have negotiated sensibly; and the home club itself gets plenty back in bar takings and prestige.
For me the likes of Aigburth and Basingstoke, not to mention more established favourites such as Cheltenham and Scarborough, are quintessential settings for the county game. Like the Championship itself they are a small but precious part of the English way of life.
If this more regular reporting of county cricket was the most enjoyable aspect of my new role, it was only a small part of it. E.W. Swanton had been very much the kingpin of the whole Telegraph cricket operation. Others since had no doubt done less, but at the time that I joined I felt that the cricket coverage had become ordinary and that it was in need of an injection of cricketing know-how when it came to the list of county reporters. That meant less work for some, and after a fair trial, the dropping of one or two. Mistakenly I replaced them for a time with two dilletantes, neither of whom knew the nuts and bolts of journalism. What were needed, of course, were ‘proper’ writers who also understood the game’s nuances.
I certainly caused offence, which I deeply regretted, by demoting one of the established free-lances, Doug Ibbotson, who was a fine wordsmith but more concerned with offering a pretty piece or a clever line than genuinely reporting the cricket and offering any insight into what had happened. You had to be an Alan Gibson or perhaps a Neville Cardus to get away with that and he was not in their exalted class. He burnt his boats finally when, reporting from Fenner’s, he gave several mentions to the talented Cambridge captain, Anurag Singh (captain of British Universities too and already a marked man as far as the England selectors were concerned), as ‘Khan’. It was careless on his part and no less on that of the sub-editors.
As I soon learned to my irritation, these no doubt worthy night-shift workers had become accustomed to making casual changes to carefully thought out copy, in the form either of cuts or superfluous additions. Sometimes they were under pressure to get an edition out in time, sometimes doing things by the book to conform to house style, but too often they would spoil the rhythm of sentences or miss cricketing points and even introduce grammatical errors.
Thus, in my early days at the Telegraph at least, I might send over something like this: ‘Alec Bedser, sagely watching for a time yesterday, would have been proud of the verve and stamina displayed by Martin Bicknell during the five-wicket spell that enabled Surrey to take control on the first day of their game against Yorkshire.’
And read instead the next morning something more like this: ‘Alec Bedser, the former Surrey and England fast-medium bowler, who was watching for a time, would have been proud of the verve and stamina displayed by the Surrey fast bowler Martin Bicknell as he took five for 46 against title-chasing Yorkshire at the Foster’s Oval yesterday.’
There were several other times, of course, when I was grateful to the subs for spotting my occasional lapses of memory. It was a team game but I had early battles to try to establish that whenever anyone wanted to change something that I had written they should consult me first.
In those days the system was to handwrite or type one’s copy and then to dictate it but soon the Tandy, the neat little laptop, enabled more direct transmission, so long as the communication worked, which it by no means always did. One had to put headphones over the speaker and earpiece of a telephone, attach it to the computer and type in the requisite code. If the line was bad chunks of copy could be lost or garbled. You had to love what you were doing, because they were long days, requiring you to get to the ground at around half past ten (I was not always there quite by then!) and seldom to get away before half past seven or later.
The great thing about being in any cricket press box, be it at a relatively sparsely attended county match or one of England’s games, was the company. Every county had its invaluable ‘local man’, prepared to pass on all but the most confidential information to help those like me who drifted into and out of the county circuit to keep more or less on the ball. Players, too, were always friendly, glad to see me at a match if only because they knew that it would be given a decent ‘show’ in the paper the following day.
There were some notable characters amongst the regulars on the circuit. In the west country the former Somerset batsman Eric Hill would sit on a raised chair in the corner of his uncomfortable box, peering over his reading glasses at the match and never missing a ball. The official scorers sat next door, separated only by a wooden partition. At Derby it was Gerald Mortimer, round but not so portly as his famous brother’s character Rumpole of the Bailey, always polite, sometimes cynical about his county’s prospects but secretly urging them on to success. At Northampton it was the assiduous Andrew Radd, at Sussex the sunny-tempered Jack Arlidge, at Canterbury the Londoner Dudley Moore, never happier than when dictating down the phone line that Kent’s opponents were in trouble at ‘firty free for free’. And so on. Gradually these men became familiar faces until, suddenly it seemed, someone younger had taken over from them, reporters who would themselves become part of the local furniture as the years passed.
At Leeds it needed several sages to service all the local papers, amongst them the lugubrious John Callaghan, the scholarly Robert ‘Freddie’ Mills, the irrepressible optimist David ‘Plum’ Warner and, the rising star, David Hopps, whose always thoughtful and shrewd writing has for years helped to lift cricket writing in the Guardian far above the prosaic. Each of these, indeed, was following a tradition set by the most acclaimed cricket writer of them all, Sir Neville Cardus, who would invent a story to illustrate a cricketer’s character to add colour to his piece and for whom ‘flights of fancy’ were what his art was all about.
The regular free-lances were another group who became welcome companions. The Telegraph had some of the best. Amongst them were Mike Beddow, always on top of anything that happened at Worcester or Edgbaston; the Anglicised Parsee, ‘Dicky’ Rutnagur, who adored the game and kept on reporting it into a frail old age; and David Green, the former Oxford, Lancashire and Gloucestershire batsman. He never stopped telling stories from his career, kept the press box in a state of constant merriment but never veered from a straight report of the match. His dispatches had plenty of cricketing insight but showed little evidence, unfortunately, of his considerable imagination. David Llewellyn, one of the most assiduous journalists I have known, was a similar curiosity. He kept immaculate records, had a vast fund of general knowledge, was for ever helping anyone who needed assistance of any kind and had the mental capacity to be a novelist of note. He was also a quite brilliant mimic; but his work in the paper was disappointingly tied by the basic rules drummed into professional journalists: who, what, when and how, with too little emphasis on the ‘how’ to make his writing as lively as one felt it should have been.
One free-lance, the long-time Guardian writer David Foot, sailed on as a reporter past his eightieth birthday, benignly watching and talking all day before dictating a measured, elegant summary of events after tea. He used to report football in the west country too and told me a remarkable story of a narrow escape from a group of the worst sort of fans in Bristol in the days when ‘hooliganism’ was common. Leaving a floodlit evening match, fortunately with a small black briefcase in hand, he found himself surrounded by hostile fans after taking a shortcut towards the railway station down a dark path between some houses. He knew that he was about to be mugged and thought quickly. ‘Please let me get through’, he said: ‘I’m a doctor and a patient needs my help urgently.’ Villainy was averted by ingenuity.
The stress of having to keep on top of the ceaseless round of ‘England stories’ and various press releases emanating from the old Test and County Cricket Board and its succssor, the England and Wales Cricket Board, increased with the years. Most of the senior cricket correspondents gradually abandoned covering county cricket but I was loath to follow them and never did. My workload w
as correspondingly much greater, but I also felt that I was much better informed, especially when some young player arrived on the international scene. Quite simply, I enjoyed the county circuit. We had far more fun, jousting verbally through a day’s play and discussing the latest gossip, than is possible now that all concerned are permanently online, unable fully to appreciate the cricket or anyone else’s company.
15
AUSTRALIA THEN AND NOW
Cloud laid out below like a great white duvet; above a deep blue void; the brain lulled and dulled by the soft zzum of the engines and modest sippings of beer or wine. ‘We have a Shiraz from the Clare Valley for you today, Mr. Jenkins. I’m told it’s very nice. Is that OK for you?’ If I am being critical the stewardess seems a little, shall we say, motherly, but, yes I assure her, it is quite OK.
Once all the Qantas stewardesses seemed fresh, bronzed and young but perhaps that was before I had the privilege, sometimes, of going business class and once, through a fortuitous meeting with a cricket-loving executive, first-class. There are worse ways to while away a few hours than this, especially when the clouds part above Australia to remind you what a huge and barren country it is.
Air journeys are part of Australian life, for many of its citizens no more unusual than for people travelling by train or car elsewhere. When I first went there in 1974, magically swapping winter for summer in twenty-four hours, Ansett Airways and Trans Australia Airways (TAA) competed for the business of whisking citizens from city to city; now Qantas, always the international carrier, seem to have something close to a monopoly. The airlines have been a commercial battlefield in Australia second only to the media, and, these days, the mines in the mineral-rich west. Minerals have made multi-millionaires of a lucky few and have simultaneously immunised the whole country from the worst effects of the recession that threatened the world economy in the second half of the noughties.
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