Can Anyone Hear Me?

by Peter Baxter

  The AIR station director here told me that our match previews would have to be delivered from their studios in Lucknow, as they had limited facilities in Kanpur itself, but remembering the previous evening’s tortuous journey, I suggested that, instead of going there, we might get the commentary box at the ground up and running on the eve of the Test match – a totally revolutionary idea for them.

  The camp telegraph office at the ground – Green Park – constructed out of the usual gaily coloured shamiana canopies, was very helpful and welcoming, at least until I discovered on the first morning of the match that they had registered all the bookings I had placed for telephone reports for Radio 2 as fixed-time telex messages, which were not a great deal of use for radio. So, we missed the first two, but thankfully all went well after that.

  They had further problems on the third morning, when it rained …

  Monday 1 February 1982

  The coloured shamiana over the telegraph office had – as anyone could have predicted – provided limited protection from the elements. As the operators were uncovering their telex machines ready for business, the pools of water overhead started to break through. The result of each deluge hitting a machine was an explosion of sparks, so that soon the tent sounded like the battlefield at the Somme.

  That Test match, in common with the previous four, was drawn. The combination of the bad weather and a shirt-front of a pitch meant that we did not even get to the end of the second innings, though at the death we were treated to the lob bowling of David Gower gathering his one and only Test wicket. It was not a bad one, either – Kapil Dev, who was very annoyed with himself for getting caught at square leg for 116.

  That first tour was a lengthy affair for me. It was made easier by having my wife join me for almost four weeks of it. However, there was still more than a month to go when she left. After six largely unexciting Test matches, the tour moved on to Sri Lanka, which, after three months in India, seemed refreshingly sophisticated.

  At that time it was extremely difficult to import anything into India which might put jobs at risk, so foreign-made cars were almost never seen there. This was the first striking difference when we arrived on her smaller neighbouring island. Our short tour in 1982, centred as it was on the inaugural Sri Lankan Test match, was confined to Colombo and Kandy and in those relatively cosmopolitan places, accustomed to foreign visitors, I found making myself understood very much easier.

  After a gruelling three months in India there was a holiday feel about much of our time here, which may have been responsible for England finding themselves in danger of losing the inaugural Test match.

  Saturday 6 February 1982

  By a quirk of timing, our flight from Madras landed in Colombo five minutes after a flight from Gatwick, which disgorged several players’ and journalists’ wives. The tearful reunions on the tarmac between the two aircraft would have done justice to any film script.

  For the first time for three months, the press and the players are in different hotels, a mile apart along the sea front and Galle Face Green, which I look out on from my room. This afternoon it was covered with people flying kites.

  Sunday 7 February 1982

  I took the opportunity to visit what will, in a few days’ time, become the world’s 53rd Test ground, the Colombo Oval, otherwise given the catchy title of the P. Saravanamuttu Stadium. It is still under construction in some places, which worryingly include the press and commentary boxes. I am dubious about whether it can be ready for a Test match in ten days’ time, but a representative of the club there told me that if I had seen it ten days ago I would understand what can be achieved. We shall see.

  The following morning we took the train up to Kandy for a warm-up game.

  Monday 8 February 1982

  For my afternoon inspection of the ground it was a delight to be able to walk through the streets from the Queens Hotel to find the narrow lane that led up to the Asgiriya Buddhist temple and the cricket ground.

  If I was surprised yesterday by the apparent disarray at the Colombo Oval, I was flabbergasted by any notion that this ground could stage a first-class match within a year, let alone tomorrow. The pavilion was barely half completed and what I eventually discovered to be the media stand was not as advanced as that.

  As it is a terrace on a hillside, the whole ground has been lowered by ten feet or so, to enlarge the playing area. As a result, the outfield is so bare in places and littered with builders’ rubble, that I could not imagine either side fancying fielding on it. If this is intended to become Sri Lanka’s second Test Match ground, as is the plan, there seems to be a great deal of work ahead.

  A little more than a year later the Asgiriya Stadium in Kandy did indeed stage its first Test match. And somehow things did work for us during the match we were about to witness between England and a Sri Lanka Board President’s XI, though there was a surprise at the breakfast table on the first morning.

  Tuesday 9 February 1982

  Our plan had been for Don to cover the first day of the match and me the second, to allow us each the chance of sightseeing. A front page piece in the local paper this morning, though, announced that the SLBC would be ‘joined by guest commentators, Don Mosey and Peter Baxter’.

  Don was irritated, not so much by the fact that no one had asked us as by the description of me as a commentator. At any rate it looked as if I would not be having my day off, at least until I had found out what this was all about.

  It turned out that they expected us to be available to them throughout the day and as I knew we would be needing their good will and assistance later I thought it would be as well to do our best for them. As the first drinks interval of the day approached, I was asked to take a seat in their box. A microphone was put in front of me and I was left to talk solo through the drinks break. At the close of play I was asked to do a three-minute recorded summary of the day’s play.

  In those days we were less familiar with Sri Lankan names and I can remember that being a major concern, as this daily summary became a regular assignment for me throughout our time in the country.

  Recorded in my notebook, but not in my diary, is the remarkable dismissal of an eighteen-year-old left-handed batsman called Arjuna Ranatunga, who cut a ball from John Emburey hard onto the buttocks of David Gower, taking evasive action at silly point. From that posterior it lobbed to the wicket-keeper, Jack Richards. Despite its slightly comical end, it had been an impressive first sight of a youngster who would go on to captain Sri Lanka to the winning of the World Cup.

  Two very tight one-day internationals at the Sinhalese Sports Club, now the premier Test ground in Colombo, which finished one apiece, preceded the inaugural Test.

  The day before the Test match a combined party of players and press were invited to lunch on the Queen Elizabeth II, as the liner was currently visiting Colombo. It was a great experience, one which I was lucky enough to repeat twenty years later in the same port, when a great friend of Jonathan Agnew was the ship’s doctor.

  On this occasion in 1982, during our tour of the ship, I was standing behind John and Susie Emburey as they looked at a huge map of the world mounted on a bulkhead. I overheard Susie pointing out that it was not very far as the crow flies from Colombo to Johannesburg. John hastily shut her up and I was such a useless journalistic sleuth that I registered nothing odd.

  Ten days later, when we were all back home, this remark as well as other little straws in the wind during the tour came back to me, as an England rebel tour set off for the currently isolated South Africa.Ian Botham’s agent had visited him in Bangalore and it now turned out that this had involved earnest discussion on an offer made to him to join the rebels. He turned it down, but Geoff Boycott had been a prime mover and that had inevitably contributed to his withdrawal from the full tour in Calcutta.

  I was not alone among journalists kicking themselves for an inability
to put the clues of what had been organised under our noses together. Five of the players whom we had accompanied round India had joined the rebel tour and most of the others had been approached.

  As well as John Emburey, Graham Gooch, John Lever and Derek Underwood, of those who had just toured India, joined Boycott in South Africa. All were subjected to a three-year ban from international cricket, which ended the Test careers of all but Gooch and Emburey.

  We departed Colombo after four months on tour, with the feeling that we had been living this itinerant life for ever. I certainly joined in the general relief that it was over and the joy at returning home. But the germ of the thrill of touring had taken hold. Sometimes the heart would sink a little at setting off and it would always leap at returning. But in the touring itself and, for my part, in simply making it work and covering the cricket without so much of the tedious administrative work of the office, I was to discover a seductive enjoyment over the next quarter of a century.

  The Cricket Highlights (i)

  Colombo 1982

  The date 17 February 1982 is a hugely important one in Sri Lankan cricket history – and probably, knowing the passions of that beautiful island, in the country’s history. It is the day they became a Test nation.England had come on from a long tour of India, which included six Test matches. They had lost the first and then endured five draws. Lovely as Sri Lanka is, most in the party just wanted to be heading home. But we had to be aware that this was a big moment for Sri Lanka.

  Wednesday 17 February 1982

  There was a huge buzz of excitement at the Colombo Oval when I got there, well ahead of the press party. And why not on the day of Sri Lanka’s entry to Test cricket?

  The Sri Lankan Air Force band played and the President met the two teams on the outfield. It was an interesting choice of music as he did so: John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, followed by the Monty Python theme tune.

  On their day of celebration, Sri Lanka won the toss and, after a shaky start, gloried in a brilliant innings of 54 from a left-handed schoolboy, Arjuna Ranatunga, who we’d seen in the warm-up match in Kandy. Madugalle, who’d made a hundred there, was 64 not out at the close. Unfortunately our day was rather marred by considerable trouble with the broadcast lines.

  After being 183 for eight at the end of the first day, Sri Lanka lasted only another 45 minutes on the following morning, with Ranjan Madugalle adding only one more, before he became Underwood’s fifth victim. But some lively tail-end batting had taken them to 218.

  England had lost three wickets before lunch, all of them to the medium paced Asantha de Mel, with 44 on the board, but David Gower and Keith Fletcher stopped the rot in the afternoon, adding 80 for the fourth wicket. 186 for five at the close of the second day was disappointing, but should be the basis for a substantial lead, particularly with Gower still there on 79.

  In the event, after the rest day, Gower only added another ten and England’s lead was kept to just five, as the spin-bowling de Silvas got to work. Somachandra, the leg spinner, took three, including Gower caught behind, and Ajith, the slow left-armer, took two.

  When Sri Lanka had reached 101 for one at tea on the third day, alarm bells were ringing in the England camp. With the prospect of batting fourth against three wily spinners, a wretched end to a disappointing tour seemed very much on the cards. They managed to capture two more before the close, but the Sri Lankan lead was now 147, with seven wickets in hand and two days to go. The chance of glory on their first Test outing was starting to seem more likely than not. Word reached the press box at the start of the fourth day that the England vice captain, Bob Willis, had addressed the team in fairly straight terms about their predicament.

  Half an hour into the fourth day, Duleep Mendis launched Derek Underwood over long on for six. It might have been a portent of things to come – but it wasn’t. Over the next eleven overs, John Emburey bowled probably the spell of his life. In it he took five for five and Sri Lanka lost their last seven wickets while adding eight runs. Emburey finished with six for 33 and Underwood took the last wicket, his eighth of the match and the 297th of his Test career. We thought it possible that he might not get the chance to get to 300, but we did not know then that it would be a prohibited tour to South Africa that was about to end his Test career.

  England now had just over five sessions to score 171 to win. It could still have been a trial against the spinners, but Chris Tavaré was the rock around whom Gooch and Gower played. He was third out for 85 and in the last session of the fourth day, Gower made it clear that he had no intention of dragging the match into a fifth day. England had survived their scare and they won by seven wickets.

  2. The Lands Down Under

  Friday 5 November 1982

  Colder than I expected and puddles on the ground, but at 5 a.m. in Perth, I was not going to pass a conclusive verdict on Australia as my German-born taxi driver delivered me to my hotel and a welcome bed after a 21-hour journey via Bombay (with smells evocative of last winter’s tour) and Kuala Lumpur.

  That was my first reaction to Australia.

  Four months earlier, I had thought that I probably would not be making this first tour Down Under, when I expressed reluctance to go along with my boss’s plan to repeat the combination of Mosey and Baxter from the previous winter in India. I really didn’t think I could face another lengthy spell of dealing with the obstinate Yorkshireman. But, to my considerable surprise, they did decide to send me, with the brief to raise a TMS commentary team there, a solution for which Don Mosey never forgave me.

  I see from my diary that on that first day in Perth I had to handle a contract crisis with the Australian Cricket Board, as the rights were still being negotiated only a week before the start of the first Test. I also met the colourful character in charge of ABC Radio Sport in Western Australia, George Grjlusic, who Henry Blofeld told me later in the day he always called ‘Grillers’. The stories from and about George are legion throughout the ABC. I can remember standing with him at the back of the ABC box in Perth as he chain smoked beside the ‘no smoking’ sign and said, disarmingly, ‘Have I told you about my colonic irrigation?’

  I was reluctant to say ‘No’, for fear of what might follow.

  I do remember surprisingly clearly that my first day in Australia ended in splendid style with dinner with Henry Blofeld and the Times correspondent, John Woodcock, at the wonderful old colonial Weld Club, where they were staying.

  In those days the Western Australian Cricket Association ground, happily always known as ‘the WACA’, was a small affair with not much more seating than a county ground. My first experience of a match in Australia was to see England sneaking home by one wicket against a full strength Western Australian side, Dennis Lillee and all. The ABC commentary box was a new structure on stilts behind the sight screen at the Swan River end, where subsequently the large Lillee-Marsh stand would be built. Then the only permanent building on the ground was the stand at the Gloucester Park racecourse end.

  On the second day of the Perth Test match there was no doubt about the incident to be discussed.

  Saturday 13 November 1982

  As England passed 400 in the late afternoon (an event certainly not predicted by Australians), a group of about twenty waving a large Union Flag ran onto the field.

  The Australian players’ habit in recent years has been to give chase in such circumstances and Terry Alderman did just that to one invader who had cuffed him on the back of the head. He tackled his quarry round the legs, but as he fell he dislocated his shoulder badly and was carried off in agony. The invaders were removed by the police and it subsequently turned out that they were Western Australian residents, although ‘Pom’ supporters.

  The affair cast a gloom over the day and was the main topic of all our reports and interviews.

  The match itself, after both sides had passed 400 and Derek Randall had made a second inn
ings century, was drawn.

  By the time I next saw Perth, in 1990, the big new stand at the Swan River end was built, with our commentary position on the high camera gantry. There were massive concrete floodlight pylons and the grassy banks had acquired a more formalised appearance, raised on either side of the ground between the banks of seating.

  Perth’s time difference with the UK – eight hours in a British winter – generally makes life easier when it comes to making contact with home. The office is fully manned in London before you reach the close of play, although the start of the day’s cricket comes at three in the morning. For the locals the time difference within their own country – three hours from coast to coast – creates its own problems. In offices on the east coast, people will reach for the phone to ring Western Australia first thing, before remembering that dawn has not yet broken on the far seaboard.

  During an Australian summer places like Sydney and Melbourne are eleven hours ahead of GMT, which make for some awkwardness. Although I did work with an editor who used the rule of thumb that everywhere in the world was eight hours away (occasionally that worked), things seem to have become worse with the new breed of producers and editors that swept in with the creation of Radio 5 Live. Early on in the 2002 tour, one of these bright young editors expressed astonishment that I was living Australian hours, instead, presumably, of staying up all night for three months and never seeing a ball bowled in the cricket.

  These editors can be slow to understand the advantage that this difference gives broadcasters over newspapers. When readers in Britain are seeing a preview of a match at their breakfast tables, the first day’s play has already happened. Team management do their best to help – for instance by releasing team news early.