I did so mainly because I felt that it would be disloyal to move to the arch rival, but the moment that I put the phone down I regretted it, and I did so even more when I conveyed my decision to Stothard, whose verdict I can hear now: ‘All you are saying is that gentlemen don’t change clubs.’ That was the truth of it. I knew, and Judy knew from my anguish over the next twenty-four hours, that I would regret it bitterly if I did not change my mind.
I did so, to Moore’s annoyance. ‘You’ve behaved badly’, he told me on the telephone. I had not: I had behaved indecisively, which was all too characteristic. He and I both knew that journalists, including high-profile ones, switch papers quite often, and that the workplace generally is far more mobile than it was in the days when a man stuck to one job or one firm all his working days. Some weeks later, indeed, I spoke at the same Wisden dinner as the revered Bill Deedes, Jeremy’s father, and, with due respect to Charles Moore’s authority and integrity, a journalist of greater value to the Telegraph than himself. Bill could not have been more understanding.
I cannot think why, but I am told that there was a stunned silence in the Sports Room in Canary Wharf when it was announced over the PA one evening that I was going to make the move. There was much speculation about who would take over and I was on good enough terms with Welch to discuss who it should be. They plumped for Michael Henderson, a quite brilliant polemical writer with a great love of music who had it in him to become, in a quite different style, a second Neville Cardus. Tall and bespectacled, his neck often swathed in a scarf and his head usually covered on sunny days by the sort of hat that might have been chosen by Oscar Wilde on his way to meet Lord Alfred Douglas, ‘Hendo’ was excellent company, trenchant in his views on cricket, football, politics and the declining values of the British nation, especially if there was a pint of bitter to hand.
He lacked only staying power to last the by now gruelling role of a globe-trotting cricket correspondent. He could be highly personal and sometimes cruel in his assessment of players, which did not make him every reader’s cup of tea. Quite a few of them followed me to The Times, appreciating the improved county coverage and my attempts to be balanced on all the issues. Others, I’m sure, found Henderson a livelier read. It took some courage on his part, for example, to describe Kevin Pietersen’s walk as ‘camper than a row of tents’. In fact I think he used the phrase in a later piece for The Times, but it was certainly not untypical.
The fact is that his work is always readable, rich as it is in strong and genuinely heartfelt opinion, and lucidly expressed by a writer far cleverer and better read than I am. But he was irascible and easily bored, not least on the England tour of South Africa in 1995/6 when the phone in his room was failing to work properly in a hotel that was second-rate at best. His solution was to open the window and to chuck the telephone receiver into the swimming-pool below. Later that winter there were no less severe tests of his patience during the World Cup on the subcontinent.
Michael had had enough and returned to the peripatetic life of a free-lance, less secure but, perhaps, happier. He was succeeded by the more prosaic Derek Pringle, who for several reasons was a sound choice: industrious, intelligent, steeped in cricket, with the added cachet of having played for England with distinction; also personable and a bachelor who was prepared to take on the same load without family distractions.
I worked as hard as ever for my old employers until the day before I joined The Times at the start of the 1999 World Cup. I was sorry to leave many of my old colleagues, not least the gentle and competent Keith Perry, who succeeded Welch as sports editor, but I liked everyone who worked on my new paper’s much more intimate sports desk. Blackmore, with his keen eye for a popular human story and Chappell, with his balanced approach, were an excellent team. Marcus Williams, an old-school professional journalist, looked after the organisation of the cricket (and rugby) pages. He was devoted to his job, loved and understood his two favourite sports, had time to talk to everyone and believed in excellence. He was the last journalist I saw to wear an anti-glare eye-shade, like those once worn by tennis players and by newspaper reporters in films such as Citizen Kane. Whenever the phone rang on his desk he would answer ‘Sporting’ with the relish of a man eager for the next good story. It was a sign of much changed times when he was suddenly made redundant late in the summer of 2010.
Amongst his responsibilities had been to decide which writer went to which match, a burden that I had always borne at the Telegraph, so this was another bonus from the change of employer. On the promise that every County Championship match would be fully reported, I persuaded one or two of the best Telegraph county cricket reporters to move with me, notably the willing enthusiast Geoffrey Dean and the assiduous Neville Scott, a reporter who always makes the most of the space he is granted. Neither seemed to me to have been fully appreciated before and it meant that there would be more chances for the plentiful supply of worthy writers available to the Telegraph.
We were joined by Pat Gibson, one of the ablest, most diligent and balanced of all the cricket writers of my time.
The Times already had some good and reliable writers, not least Richard Hobson, a quietly spoken journalist from Nottingham with an independent mind, genuine love of the game, good judgement and, essential for anyone working for newspapers these days, a capacity for hard work. Now deputy to my celebrated successor, Mike Atherton, Richard has grown impressively in authority since I suggested that he should be given the chief responsibility for our coverage of one-day cricket.
Until the demands of the job began to wear me down again, I greatly enjoyed my years on The Times. I cannot believe there has ever been a calmer or more charming sports editor than Chappell, although there was an iron fist beneath his velvet glove when it was necessary to clench it in the interest of his pages.
I recall two examples, the first at Old Trafford in 2001 when, for the only time, he very politely and tactfully suggested to me that, after a dramatic final day’s play and the late, unexpected seizure of the second Test match by Pakistan, my copy needed a little revision. Lesser men and lesser newspapers might simply have used a senior sub-editor to wield a large blue pencil.
David knew me to be a little sensitive about the merest change of a semi-colon so, once the inadequate piece for the first edition had been rushed into print, he rang me on the mobile and convinced me, weary as I was after five days of hard work in Manchester, to stop at the nearest motorway café and rejig the story. Looking at my first effort as I sipped one of Sam Costa’s finest froffy coffees, I was appalled by, amongst other things, my failure to give due weight to the big television story that five of England’s dismissals in one of their customary collapses had come from no balls that the umpires had failed to spot. Fond as I was of the embarrassed official, the late and much lamented David Shepherd, I had underplayed the significance of his uncharacteristic laxity. Chappell’s judgement was sounder.
The other occasion was during a tour of Sri Lanka, where the time difference works in the reporter’s favour, generally speaking. I had taken sufficient care over my day’s report, filed from a hotel where the communications were sometimes uncertain – and duly had been on this particular evening – for it to be well past midnight when I got to bed. Three hours later, in that state of profound sleep from which no one wishes to be stirred, the telephone beside my bed began ringing insistently. At the other end was David, informing me apologetically that Sir Donald Bradman had died and that 1000 words were required within half an hour. The combination of Bradman and Chappell brooked no argument. It is amazing how the brain stirs into action when confronted with a deadline like that and a story of that magnitude.
On the whole I think it was generally accepted that for the majority of my relatively short period of nine years as Times correspondent the cricket pages were the best in the business, despite strong competition from the Guardian, the Telegraph and, sometimes, the Independent and the Mail. There were readers who simply refused to support
any publication owned by Rupert Murdoch, so not everyone appreciated the improvements. Towards the end of my time, as space became more variable and unpredictable and Premier League football dominated sports coverage to the exclusion of too much else, the Telegraph had probably regained pole position, although these assessments are always subjective. Recently the sports pages of The Times, given more space and shrewdly edited by Tim Hallissey, have been second to none, not least in the overall coverage of cricket.
It was, I suppose, my bad luck that there were some painful years for the paper following the apparently hasty decision under Robert Thompson’s editorship to start producing a tabloid, or, as he called it, ‘compact’ version, in 2004. There were several traumatic months for all involved when hard-pressed staff inside were producing both a broadsheet and a tabloid newspaper every night. The more conscientious writers in the field were sending pieces of different lengths to suit the relevant formats, but we all knew that the blueprint for the future was, as Eric Morecambe might have said, the short, fat and hairy version.
Murdoch took another bold decision when he started charging online readers for the privilege of reading The Times in 2010, a calculation that seems to be paying off handsomely as the sale of iPads has enabled newspaper reading on the move in a flexible and very compact format indeed. No more bashing your neighbour in the face accidentally on the 7.42 to Waterloo as you struggle to turn the page of your elegant old broadsheet.
The newspaper itself has improved immeasurably from an aesthetic point of view under James Harding’s editorial control since its clumsy first venture into the tabloid market but I cannot help raising my eyebrows when the first words on a front page of what was once ‘the Top People’s Newspaper’ are ‘What Men don’t want for Valentines’.
22
SPARKLING TEAMS AND CHAMPAGNE MOMENTS
England’s rise to the top of the tree in Test cricket in 2012 inevitably invited comparison with other outstanding teams. Since Don Bradman’s 1948 ‘Invincibles’, whose prowess escaped my attention at the age of three, they have been, in chronological order, England under Len Hutton and Peter May in the mid 1950s; Ali Bacher’s South Africa team in the late 1960s just before their long isolation; Australia in the era of the Chappells; the West Indies sides under Clive Lloyd and Viv Richards, their panoply of hounding fast bowlers generally too hot, calculating and accurate for everyone for some fifteen years from the late 1970s; and the Australian combinations led first by Steve Waugh and then by Ricky Ponting in their years of world domination from 1999 to 2008.
I doubt if there was ever a better balanced combination than these relatively recent Australian sides. Bradman’s 1948 team was invincible in its time, but bottom heavy with seamers when it bowled England out for 52 and 188 to complete a summer of triumphs at The Oval. Any team with the most prolific batsman of all time was hard to beat, as Australia were from Bradman’s second Test match on (in his first they lost to England by 665 runs). By the time his own post-war team reached a peak in 1948 there was a formidable bowling attack in Lindwall, Miller, Bill Johnston and the nagging Ernie Toshack to support a batting line-up of Morris, Barnes, Bradman, Harvey, Miller and Loxton. Don Tallon was no doubt a more reliable keeper than Gilchrist but neither Ian Johnson nor Doug Ring was much of a spinner judged by the highest standards.
England in the middle 1950s, by contrast, had as talented a pool of resources as at any time before or since and, as with Ponting’s side, there never seemed to be any weak links. There may not have been the same ruthlessness, quite, but that is merely because it was a different era. Consider the XI that played the first Test against South Africa at Trent Bridge in 1955: Kenyon, Graveney, May, Compton, Barrington, Bailey, Evans, Wardle, Tyson, Statham and Appleyard. It included none of the three recently discarded or retired titans, Bedser, Edrich and Hutton; but there was no need either for Trueman, Loader, Laker, Lock or Cowdrey, to name but five.
As every keen South African knows, the best side in their long era of white-only cricketers was never able to flaunt its talent except in the series in which they thrashed Australia at home by four matches to nil in a four-match rubber in 1969/70. That team contained sufficient world-class players to have been a match for anyone: Barry Richards, Graeme Pollock and Mike Procter were great cricketers, men like Trevor Goddard, Eddie Barlow, Ali Bacher, Lee Irvine, Dennis Lindsay, Peter Pollock and John Traicos very good ones.
Ian Chappell’s Australia side in 1974/5 would certainly have been a match for Ponting’s, always remembering, however, that they would have had to overcome Warne. The two Chappells and the dashing Doug Walters would have tested Warne, if not mastered him, and while Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson were operating together, with Max Walker and Ashley Mallett in support, they were another fearsome combination.
Barely half so fearsome, however, as the the West Indies teams who, under Clive Lloyd and Viv Richards from the late seventies to the early 1990s, dominated all opponents. Their best XI in 1980 would have been: Greenidge, Haynes, Richards, Kallicharran, Lloyd, Gomes, Deryck Murray, Marshall, Roberts, Garner and Holding. The near invincibility came, of course, from the fast bowling. Never in the history of the game has there been a combination to match that quartet. Yet in the same period there were ferocious fast bowlers of the highest quality who would have been given the new ball by every other country: Colin Croft, Wayne Daniel, Sylvester Clarke, Winston Davis, Norbert Philip and so on. Still to come were the likes of Winston and Keith Benjamin, Ezra Moseley and the mighty duo of Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh.
It was depressing at the time for purists and lovers of the game’s variety that, despite slow bowling all-rounders as useful as Roger Harper and Carl Hooper, the West Indies seldom had any need of spinners. But such was the formidable strength of the fast bowling for so long that in most conditions they would have steam-rollered most teams at any point in history.
Students of Australian success after 1989, unbroken except briefly in India, Sri Lanka and England, will have some difficulty in deciding whether Ponting’s team was better than those commanded by Mark Taylor and Steve Waugh. The XI, for example, that beat West Indies at Brisbane in 2000/2001, during the record run of sixteen Test wins in a row, was Slater, Hayden, Langer, Mark Waugh, Steve Waugh, Ponting, Gilchrist, Bichel, Lee, MacGill and McGrath. No Warne but MacGill, his reserve, took 208 wickets in 48 Tests. He was a brilliant little bowler, lacking only Warne’s extraordinary accuracy, temperament and consistency.
If you were to draw Ricky Ponting’s 2006 XI to play for your money in a trial of strength against any but the 1980 West Indies you would consider yourself to be in with a good chance of a sudden improvement to your bank balance. First and foremost you would have in Shane Warne the greatest of all leg-spinners bowling for you, not just with incomparable accuracy and power of spin but with seldom equalled zeal and will to win. In temperament he was like a spiritual son of one of Bradman’s trump cards, ‘Tiger’ Bill O’Reilly. In Ponting you would have a captain who, despite his eventual failures, revealed rare depths of determination and in whom leadership brought even more from a quick-eyed, quick-footed batting talent that had made him Australia’s greatest match-winner since Keith Miller. Unlike most of the outstanding Australian batsmen he has gone on too long, but, at his best, only Greg Chappell has equalled him amongst the Australian batsmen I have seen.
By 2006 Glenn McGrath was past his peak but still an utterly reliable performer, guaranteed to hit the seam on a length and off-stump line time and time again, the basis of all good fast bowling. If he had not trodden on a ball just before the start of the 2005 Edgbaston Test I dare say Australia would have won that series. That they did not had much to do with Andrew Flintoff’s surging strength and the way in which he undermined the two bullying left-handers, Matthew Hayden and Adam Gilchrist. A year later, Gilchrist’s totally uninhibited hundred from fifty-seven balls at Perth was a reminder that great cricketers will usually have their revenge.
Warne and McGrath ret
ired together after the Sydney Test, as did Justin Langer, not a great player, quite, but an immeasurably determined one and an assiduous worker on his technique with a fine record of 7650 runs from his 104 Tests at an average of 45. The mighty Hayden, who, with Gilchrist, followed these three into retirement soon afterwards, shared first wicket partnerships with Langer that averaged 51. Only Bobby Simpson and Bill Lawry averaged better as a partnership – 59 for their 3596 runs. In all countries only Desmond Haynes and Gordon Greenidge, with 6482, exceeded their output in runs.
From the opening batsmen to the new ball bowling attack of McGrath and Brett Lee this was a perfectly balanced XI without a weak link. England may have been weaker than they had been in 2005 but Australia were stronger in four individual respects: at that stage Michael Hussey was averaging 82 after fifteen Tests; Stuart Clark had taken 42 wickets in eight games, played mainly on good batting pitches, at the extraordinary average of 17; Michael Clarke had returned to the side to sharpen the fielding with loose-limbed brilliance and to make the most of another rare batting talent after a period of repentance and hard work. He scored 378 runs at 94.5 in the series with two centuries. Finally Andrew Symonds had at last made the most of his long-recognised gifts, balancing the team as the number six batsman, a sensational fielder, and – like Brian Close or Bob Appleyard – a swing bowler one moment, an off-spinner the next.
Ponting’s team lost only one of its first 21 series, losing by a single game to England in 2005 but winning 19 and drawing the other. Warne and McGrath took 1271 Test wickets in all between them.
The best teams become clearer with time and the same is true of the ‘champagne moments’, even if the earliest of mine were witnessed only at second hand:
1953 (two young for champers!): England regained the Ashes at The Oval after (just on) nineteen years. Hutton, Edrich, May, Compton, Graveney, Bailey, Evans, Laker, Lock, Trueman, Bedser. If ever a side deserved MBEs to a man it was that one. Happily, most of them eventually got medals of one kind or another. The captain and master batsman, and his leading bowler, were knighted. I got to know all these heroes and in my year as MCC president dedicated a mature oak tree to the toughest of them all at Sir Alec Bedser’s other sporting haunt, West Hill Golf Club, near his lifelong home at Woking.
CMJ Page 29
