The last indelible memories of cricket in Pakistan are of the thrilling fast bowling of Shoaib Akhtar and the classical batting of the inscrutable Inzamam in 2005, and of the frightening moment when a gas canister exploded at the boundary’s edge during the Faisalabad Test (the only one of the three that England did not manage to lose). There had been much talk of terrorist activity before the tour and I am sure that when that deafening explosion occurred and the crowd nearby scattered like raindrops in a storm there was no one at the ground who did not immediately think that a bomb must have exploded.
The only man not perturbed, it seems, was the buccaneering all-rounder Shahid Afridi, who took advantage of the temporary mayhem by screwing his studs into the pitch to try to get some purchase for the bowlers. Unfortunately for this gifted but naïve cricketer, he was caught by a television camera, just as he was a few years later when he bit the side of the ball to try to get it to reverse swing. Might one call this singular personality just a soupçon impetuous?
What has happened since to Pakistan is desperate. Terrorism has prevented the staging of international matches at home and in 2010 a News of the World sting all too convincingly uncovered alleged corruption on the part of three members of their team, including two of the best fast bowlers in the world. Salman Butt, innocent seeming but as captain the most to blame, Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Aamer, not yet nineteen years old, were all found guilty late in 2011, despite expensive legal representation. After exhaustive hearings they were each banned from all cricket for at least five years by an experienced panel of ICC judges, one of them the widely respected and famously liberal Albie Sachs of South Africa. The three cricketers and the agent who sucked them in all subsequently received gaol sentences after the criminal trial in London. It was necessary pour encourager les autres.
I first became aware of the corruption that starts with the complicated network of illegal bookmakers in India when I was working for the Daily Telegraph in Sharjah in the 1990s. I was reporting on a tournament that was eventually won by an England team under Adam Hollioake, almost certainly with the help of some contrivance from Pakistan. I had suspected nothing until I went to check a competition rule and found two very famous former Test captains, one from India and one from Pakistan, whose demeanor was so shifty and suspicious that I simply knew that I had stumbled inadvertently on a match-fixing scam.
As most now appreciate, there are two kinds of ‘match-fixing’. First, spot-fixing for money, such as deliberately bowling a wide or a no-ball at a prearranged moment in the game, or two batsmen limiting their scoring during a period of overs to an agreed amount of runs. Secondly, and obviously worse, there have been examples of attempts actually to fix a result, requiring the involvement of several corrupt players. The whole business is sordid in the extreme and anathma to all those who love cricket. The lesson of history is that the sooner decisive action is taken against wrongdoers the better.
The scams seem to have started during one-day matches played away from the mainstream in the 1980s and 1990s in countries such as Sharjah. For once the ICC, driven by the ECB chairman at the time, Lord MacLaurin, took decisive, and relatively effective, action by appointing the distinguished policeman Lord Condon as head of the governing body’s Anti-Corruption Unit, set up in 2000. Three Test captains, Salim Malik of Pakistan, Mohammad Azharuddin of India and Hansie Cronje of South Africa were banned – and disgraced – for life and a regime of education, investigation and prevention was put in place by a department now headed by another senior British policeman, Sir Ronnie Flanagan. But other leading players known to be involved were sullied without being banned (including the earlier India captain whom I had sensed was fixing things in Sharjah) and the constraints of the law prevented Condon and his team from nailing anyone else.
The education process for young international players, who are all shown warning videos of how they might be sucked into corruption without realising it as soon as they play under-19 representative cricket, has been successful to the point where Condon felt able, when he retired, to describe cricket as a ‘very clean sport’, one that was setting an example to sports like tennis and athletics in dealing with corruption. But the passionate following for cricket both on the Indian subcontinent and amongst the diaspora, the habit of gambling – by Condon’s estimate ‘a billion dollars worldwide bet on a single match’ – and the sheer complexity of cricket makes the game peculiarly susceptible to criminal deceit.
Partly because of the corruption that appears to be endemic in many forms of life in Pakistan and partly because their players are paid no more than an estimated £3000 a Test, about half the basic fees earned by their English and Australian opponents, the likes of Mohammad Aamer, the most gifted of those found guilty, are more vulnerable to temptation than most. Not that this was an acceptable excuse, unless it was true that the guilty players feared for themselves and their families if they did not co-operate with criminals. Aamer, after all, was rich beyond the dreams of almost all other eighteen-year-olds in his country. He was the most glittering talent to have emerged since Wasim Akram, a cricketer of legendary skill tainted in the report by the Pakistan Judge Qayum, but he was young enough to return to international cricket.
Preventing corruption is the hardest part of the ACSU’s responsibilities. They ban mobile phones in the dressing-room, for example, but wealthy young players can have more than one phone, and there is always the lavatory. In England in 2009 three players reported approaches from would-be micro-fixers during the Twenty20 World Cup, won by Pakistan, and a year later a young Essex cricketer was arrested for an offence identical to those alleged to have occurred in the 2010 Lord’s Test.
Good men, like the coaches of the Pakistan team in recent years, Bob Woolmer and Geoff Lawson, have worked with honest officials such as the former PCB chief executive Ramiz Raja to make Pakistan team selection fairer and to give the best players proper contracts. Facilities at the cricket stadiums in Lahore and Karachi, cities not directly affected by recent natural earthquake and flood disasters, are excellent, as they are at Lahore’s National Cricket Academy. Brilliant young cricketers continue to emerge, but it seems that cricket generally, Pakistan cricket in particular, and many innocent citizens of this sad and complex nation will never be completely free from the consequences of moral weakness.
18
NEW ZEALAND
The Wellington Test disappeared down the appropriately named Basin in a whoosh of wind and rain from the Antarctic at a time when it was already certain to become the third draw of a dreadfully disappointing series . . .
The pitches, the weather and the lack of star quality on both sides made the whole series desperately mundane. Fortunately the good weather on the first three days at the Basin Reserve ensured good crowds on a ground with a real cricketing atmosphere (the hill here has grown even as Sydney’s has shrunk) but generally crowds were small and even if they were to be better for the four one-day internationals the odds were that the New Zealand Cricket Council would not be announcing a profit . . .
The expensive England bowling averages tell how this series was a case of mediocre bowlers being frustrated by the torpidity of the pitches. Dilley, like Chatfield for New Zealand, was the exception, but DeFreitas took four wickets at 43, Capel five at 54, Emburey three at 78, Radford one at 132 and Hemmings none at a cost of 107. Hemmings rolled cheerfully back into the England XI at Wellington but predicted in advance that the pitch would last a fortnight. These old pros know, you know . . .
It is truly hard in my experience not to enjoy any trip to New Zealand but this beautiful, isolated, weather-beaten land was the last of the major cricket-playing nations that I visited and some of the disadvantages of travelling there to watch cricket are contained in that dispatch to The Cricketer in 1988. The pitches, and therefore the matches played on them, too often lack life and the national passion for Rugby Union leaves cricket as a poor relation. Add the complications for a newspaper reporter of the time difference betwee
n Australasia and Europe and it is easy to explain why the visits of MCC and England sides over the years have tended to be low key.
The ground at Wellington is, in fact, the only one of the country’s major cricket grounds on which Rugby Union is not played most of the year. If the pitch for the first match on which I watched Test cricket there was a batsman’s paradise, those on subsequent visits have produced some lively games, not least in 2008, on my last tour as Times correspondent. Jimmy Anderson and Paul Collingwood, two of England’s doughtiest cricketers in recent times, were mainly responsible, but it would have been a very close game but for a spritely and opportunistic century by a stocky little wicket-keeper destined to be forgotten by all but the closest students of the game. The likeable Tim Ambrose proved then that every dog has his day.
For some time the visits of touring teams from England used to be tagged on to the end of the much higher profile series for the Ashes in Australia. Those who could, both players and journalists, went home early, leaving the pleasures of New Zealand to others. As soon as I experienced them, I knew what I had been missing. Here were beautiful and varied scenery, small cities, a high standard of living, good food, many superb wines, glorious and empty golf courses and, above all, Anglophile people (generally speaking) with old-fashioned values.
Even in 1987 black Morris Minor cars like the first one that I had driven in 1962 (number plate 7381 U) were common. In New Plymouth, I recall, the Christmas lights were still illuminated after dark in March. Things happened slowly here and some found it all a bit dull: ‘Will the last person in New Zealand please turn out the light’ was the familiar insult at one time. Certainly it was not the place for people who come alive at night, although one such, the late ‘Crash’ Lander, former cricket correspondent of the Daily Mirror, once persuaded me to the high-rollers’ room at the Christchurch Casino, where I proceeded to lose fifty dollars in a game of blackjack in the time that it takes to blink three times. Only on a visit to the greyhound track at Hove in aid of a charity many years before had I found a way of losing money so quickly.
From a selfish viewpoint the wonderful thing about tours to this country was the relative lack of interest in the cricket. There were more days off than usual, less demand for interviews on my tour as BBC correspondent, or for feature articles when I returned in later years for the Telegraph and Times. This was touring more as it must have been for my predecessors in more leisurely times. England teams have usually played well in conditions not unlike their own, despite the admirable way in which New Zealand sides have generally punched above their weight. That was especially in the era when Jeremy Coney was their cerebral captain. He had the great advantage, too, of being able to call upon match-winners. Richard Hadlee and Martin Crowe would have been almost the first bowler and batsman picked in any World XI at the time.
It was no coincidence that England’s best performance in a World Cup away from home occurred in 1992. Their preparation for a final against Pakistan at Melbourne had consisted of a focused but relatively relaxed tour of New Zealand. The tournament that followed, held jointly in New Zealand and Australia, was the best since the first one in 1975.
In the end England succumbed to Imran Khan’s monumental will and the wiles of Wasim Akram and Mushtaq Ahmed but most things had gone right for them until then, especially during the first phase of the trip. Phil Tufnell spun them to victory with only ten minutes left in Christchurch, flighting the ball like a shuttlecock to take seven for 47. At Auckland that enigmatic man and cricketer Chris Lewis later gaoled for drug-smuggling, played a leading role with bat and ball. But it was another Englishman of West Indian origins who unwittingly left the most lasting memory of the Wellington Test.
The giant Gloucestershire fast bowler David Lawrence had begun his tour by dismissing another unfortunate cricketer, Trevor Franklin, with a bouncer that cannoned to the wicket-keeper off the batsman’s forearm, breaking it in the process. The umpire wrongly gave poor Franklin out before he went to hospital for his X-ray. Fate had worse in mind for Lawrence on a hot afternoon at the Basin Reserve. As his front foot landed in his delivery stride his left knee buckled and he crashed to the ground like a felled oak tree. The knee-cap had split horizontally into two parts. His scream of agony was appalling.
As on all my tours, it was often the smaller places and lower profile games that I enjoyed most. Since they were not televised one was able to tell listeners or readers about places and players with which few if any would be familiar. Dunedin, for instance, proudly known, by locals mainly descended from Scottish forebears, as the Edinburgh of the south, may have had a rather ugly cricket and rugby ground, Carisbrook Park, but it also possesses a superb golf course almost in the middle of the town, Balmacewen. It wends its way through hills, some bare and green, others covered in fir-trees and all very reminiscent of Perthshire.
Not far from Otago there is the sort of wildness that makes the country so special. There are huge colonies both of gannet and albatross – the only time that I have seen those huge and wandering sea-birds. ‘And a good south wind sprung up behind, the Albatross did follow.’ Here, too, as in many parts of the coast of both islands, you can see plenty of seals and sometimes also whales. Judy and I had a thrilling time one afternoon off the north of the North Island just before my work began on my last visit, following the swift black and white orcas, as they disappeared, then appeared again with menacing leaps ahead of our speedy little boat, like super-charged submarines.
The most charming and accomplished of the New Zealand cricket commentators with whom I have worked (although not the longest-serving, who must surely now be the loyal and ebullient Bryan Waddle) is Iain Gallaway. A war-time RAF pilot and greatly respected lawyer, he always invited me, and Judy when she was with me, to his comfortable and, by New Zealand standards, very large Victorian house. A traditionalist if ever there was, who always referred to Britain as ‘home’ although he had been a Kiwi all his life, he showed me proudly around his old grey-stoned school, Christ’s College at Christchurch, where he was a governor. The boys, many of them looking big enough for an All Black scrum, still wore shorts all the year round. In 1988 he also took me to the Dunedin Club, which was defiantly old-fashioned and outdid even the Melbourne and Adelaide Clubs – and the Weld in Perth, Western Australia – for stuffiness.
There is no doubt that the Antipodeans can outdo the British sometimes when it comes to being behind the times. By comparison the East India Club in St. James’s Square, which I joined when journeys home to Sussex and back up to Lord’s or The Oval during London Test matches took so long that I seemed scarcely to be tucked up in bed before it was time to get up again, is far friendlier and also less exclusive. It does not bother me that there are ‘smarter’ clubs for a pukka chap to belong to!
Gallaway never commentated other than briefly on tours of England – Waddle and his predecessor, the no less genial Alan Richards were the ‘staff’ men for Radio New Zealand – but he was the first to cover an overseas tour for RNZ, travelling to India and Pakistan in 1955/6 as the sole representative of the entire Kiwi media. He serviced both radio and the NZ Press Association. At one match he claimed to have broadcast from the middle of a tree-trunk in Lahore and he later shared a commentary box with the fabled but not very distinguished India Test batsman the Maharajah of Vizianagram, who averaged eight in his three games for his country. Iain told me that ‘Vizzy’ fancied himself as a pundit so much that when he was not asked to do the Tests by All India Radio he organised a special game for the touring team against his own XI at Benares so that he could commentate on it, which he solemnly did for all three days.
Two grounds in particular in New Zealand linger in the memory for their sheer beauty, in the same way that Arundel does, and a number of other glorious English grounds. Pukekura Park at New Plymouth, too small, unfortunately, for major matches other than the occasional one-day international, is a sumptuous botanical garden. With its wide variety of trees and large lake it is rather
reminiscent of Sheffield Park in East Sussex, where several of the early Australian sides played in the late 19th century. At Pukekura the playing area is like a bowling green, with steep banks on three sides and tiered seats cut into the turf, shaded by trees at the top that positively throb with the whirr of cicadas. From high vantage points you can see both a sea dotted with oil-rigs and, inland, the 8000-foot snow-capped extinct volcano, Taranaki, reminiscent of Mount Teide in Tenerife.
Anybody who has seen any of the films made of J.R.R.Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings will be able to imagine the other ground near Queenstown on the South Island. Open to the four winds, it is surrounded on all sides by high, jagged and rocky mountains, themselves straight from fantastical fairy-tales.
I funked the bungy-jump in Queenstown but went whitewater rafting. It is for excitements like these, rather more than the cricket, that New Zealand always seems worth the long journey.
19
SRI LANKA
You have read about dark and stormy nights but this one was different. There was no howling gale, just a vertical descent of water from a black sky, as if the plug had just been removed from some giant lake. Drivers in Sri Lanka often have to contend with tropical storms like this, but not in a taxi apparently held together by sellotape, nor in one whose windscreen-wipers had long ago given up the ghost. As what seemed to be buckets full of water splashed continually against the front window, conjuring visions of Jack Hawkins on the bridge in The Cruel Sea, my thin and anxious looking driver turned his steering wheel from side to side, his eyes pressed right up against the glass like a blind man in a blizzard.
I am not quite sure how I survived that first car journey in Sri Lanka, nor a few I have made there since. In 1977 I had arrived from Bombay on a thirty-four-seater Avro Anson. Eventually the driver and I made it to the most famous building on Colombo’s sea-front, the Galle Face hotel, a handsome old stone building looking out across its lush front lawn to waves pounding in off the Indian Ocean.
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