Can Anyone Hear Me?

by Peter Baxter

  Atherton made it to the second over before he bagged his pair and England were still five runs behind at the close, with two wickets down.

  Tuesday 29 December 1998

  I heard a radio piece in the morning on the ABC by Tim Lane, suggesting that England were bound for inevitable defeat today or tomorrow, which I thought a little strong. I teased him about it when I got to the ground.

  However, he seemed right when England were all out for 244 before tea. Australia needed only 175 to win.

  Though Stewart and Hussain had both reached 50, neither had gone on. Hick was batting with the tail to reach 60 before he was ninth out.

  With the last wicket falling half an hour before tea, the interval was taken early. With the half hour tacked on to the end of the day already, that left a scheduled three-and-a-half-hour session to play, with even the possibility of extra time. So Australia could get these runs in the session.

  They reached 100 with only two wickets down. Ramprakash took a flying one-handed catch at square leg, to dismiss Langer off Mullally, but at 130 for three with the Waugh twins together, the result seemed certain. Then Dean Headley got to work.

  He had already removed Michael Slater at the start of the innings. Now he started a devastating spell by having Mark Waugh caught at slip for 43 and over his next 13 balls he took four for four. Lehmann, Healey and Fleming followed Waugh and suddenly it was 140 for seven.

  Matthew Nicholson had been brought into the Australian side for this, his only Test match. Now he joined Steve Waugh to stop the rot and help him add 21 crucial runs. The official close of play was reached with fifteen runs needed for an Australian win. England appeared only too willing to go off and the fielders started to head for the dressing room. But Waugh – maybe because of England’s obvious reluctance – went to the umpires to claim the extra half hour to finish the match.

  The state of the light and a session now heading towards four hours caused Alec Stewart, the captain, to protest. But to no avail.

  However, in the first over of the extra half hour, Headley had Nicholson caught behind. It was 161 for eight. On the phone at the back of the commentary box, I got a call from Radio 4’s Today programme for an update in their sports slot.

  Tuesday 29 December 1998

  As I was doing the report, Gough bowled MacGill with a yorker. Steve May, presenting the sport, picked up, saying that he was off to listen to the commentary on long wave, which drew a slightly churlish response from Sue MacGregor.

  However, a minute later, they were back on (I gather as a result of pressure from James Naughtie) to hear that Gough had just had McGrath lbw and England had won by 13 runs.At 7.35 in the evening, England had won the Test by that slender margin, after what was quite probably the longest ever day’s Test cricket.

  Despite a hat trick by Darren Gough on the first day, Australia won the final Test in Sydney, thanks to MacGill’s twelve wickets and a remarkable hundred by Michael Slater in a second innings of 184 all out.

  3. The Best Tour

  In the very small hours of 31 October 1984 David Gower’s England team arrived in Delhi and I was with them.

  For a variety of reasons, not least that my daughter, Claire, was approaching her first birthday, I had not been very keen to go on this trip. Bizarrely it turned out to be the best tour I have ever been on, even with its ill-starred beginnings. I think all the participants – be they players or press – has remained a good friend ever since

  Wednesday 31 October 1984

  I had scarcely closed my eyes when the phone was ringing. A voice from London was saying, ‘We’re putting you through to the Foreign Duty Editor about this Ghandi business.’

  I did not have a clue what she was talking about, but the FDE made it clear. ‘Mrs Ghandi has been shot. She may even be dead. Could you get down to the BBC office and give Satish Jacob a hand.’

  Satish Jacob, Mark Tully’s number two, was holding the fort while the legendary BBC Delhi correspondent was out of town covering Princess Anne’s visit to Dehra Dun. When I arrived at the office he was in the middle of a live report for Radio 4, while the other phone in the office was forever ringing with enquiries about the situation. Soon I was helping with the scripting of his reports and offering advice on the sort of audience he might be broadcasting to in Britain and what this momentous news might mean to them.

  I had not been at the office long when the first agency report of Mrs Ghandi’s death came in. We advised London, but remained cautious. Then came a second report and Satish checked the source. It became clear that the Indian prime minister was indeed dead. Down the line from London the Foreign Duty Editor said, ‘If you’re confident, go with it.’

  I took a deep breath and wrote it for Satish’s next report.

  As the Today programme ended, the word from London was that one of us should be out, gathering material. Satish reckoned that he was better placed by the phone, so I headed off in a taxi. The prime minister’s residence was cordoned off, so I felt that the hospital was the best place to start.

  Armed only with a BBC identity card and a tape recorder, I walked straight in and it became immediately clear that news of her death was not generally known. I was told that they were still operating on her.

  Outside the front of the Medical Institute I found a huge crowd, eerily subdued. Rumours of the death were beginning to circulate, but most people seemed unprepared to accept that as a fact. Government ministers started leaving the hospital without any noticeable reaction from the crowd.

  Thus started my second visit to India. From the hospital I went to the Overseas Communication Service, not far from Parliament and the only place in those days from which we could get a studio line to London. There I delivered a report for the Radio 4 one o’clock news and, after waiting at the studios in case there was any further development to report, returned to the BBC office where Mark Tully had now taken over and was pounding at his portable typewriter.

  Wednesday 31 October 1984

  What of the cricket tour? With difficulty I persuaded a taxi driver to take me back to the hotel. There was, it seemed, trouble in the city, which had started as darkness fell and the news sank in, so we took a circuitous route.

  After interviewing the team manager, Tony Brown, I tried to get a taxi back to the OCS studios, but none of the drivers were prepared to do it and the hotel staff advised me to stay put. There were now apparently full-scale riots in the city. I booked a call to London, but was told that overseas lines were ‘sealed’.

  That seal was broken in the early hours of the morning, at which point my phone started ringing off the hook.

  For the next few days we were firmly advised to stay put, as reports of riots in the city came back to us. A helpful member of the hotel staff pointed out to me columns of smoke rising from fires not too far away. ‘That’s a Sikh-owned garage,’ he said, ‘and that’s a Sikh school.’ It was, it seemed, Sikh members of Mrs Ghandi’s own bodyguard who had killed her and so vengeance was being taken.

  Under our curfew we became a close-knit band of brothers, players and press together, exchanging information in a way that happened on no other tour I went on. My days involved garnering whatever news I could and plenty of waiting for booked telephone calls to and from London.

  Thursday 1 November 1984

  At 11 p.m., work done, I left my room to see if any developments had occurred late in the day. I immediately ran into an hotel messenger. ‘Ah, Mr. Baxter,’ he said. ‘I have message.’

  He handed me a piece of paper. It said ‘London rang at 9.30 and will ring again in half an hour.’

  ‘It’s a bit late to tell me now,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t I get the original message?’

  ‘No,’ he explained. ‘This is not original message. This is carbon copy. Original message is in ink.’

  Thereafter the British High Commission provided
some makeshift practice facilities for the players, though, as I soon found out, leaving the hotel was still not an option for the press. The newsroom in London suggested that I could get to the Overseas Communications Centre to meet a broadcast circuit to London. But no taxi driver was prepared to take me there or to the BBC office, which was a little less central. It was clear that the policy was to keep all foreigners in their hotels.

  As early as the day after the assassination the team management had received an offer from Sri Lanka to go there for a short spell until things quietened down. As the Indian Board considered inevitable changes to the tour itinerary, they were clearly not enamoured of any suggestion of the England team leaving the country with the possibility that they might not return. They were quite happy to leave the team with another ten days of net practice while the country was in official mourning.

  Saturday 3 November 1984

  It seemed that all telephone traffic in and out of the country had been stopped for the funeral of Mrs Ghandi, which we watched on television as it took place about two miles away from the hotel.

  By the evening we had news that a new tour itinerary had been drawn up, involving four Tests. In the meantime the tour manager, Tony Brown, had insisted that we leave for Sri Lanka tomorrow, to be out of the way while the official mourning went on.

  The team had the offer of a lift on the Sri Lankan president’s plane as he returned from the funeral. That left the press corps of eleven to make our own arrangements.

  Fortunately we had help from the crew making a television mini-series, ‘Mountbatten – the Last Viceroy’. They had just finished all their Indian shots and had a bit more location work to do in Sri Lanka. They had a fairly large aircraft to accommodate themselves and all their equipment.

  Sunday 4 November 1984

  They were a fascinating, larger-than-life bunch to rattle around with in an airbus for the three-hour flight.

  Ian Richardson, who was playing Nehru, was as languid as when he had been a Le Carré spy. Sam Dastor had changed his appearance so much for the part of Ghandi that Indian officials at the airport had questioned his passport photograph, but were eventually honoured to be in the presence of the man playing the Mahatma.

  The American director, Judith de Paul, seemed intrigued by the little band of English cricket writers and we were lined up for her inspection before we boarded. The whole crew were very friendly.

  A three-day practice match was followed by a semi-official one-day international, which was designed to pay for the trip, but a torrential downpour at the half-way stage ended that exercise. I visited the dressing room, the door of which was obscured by a torrential curtain of falling water. The players were sitting on tables to keep out of the flood and David Gower proposed the bathroom as the only dry bit of ground for me to interview him on. That became something of a theme for the rest of the tour, as he would mischievously look for a similar studio facility at every opportunity.

  The next day, exactly a week after leaving Delhi, we returned to India, arriving this time in Bombay to begin a tour that had been yet again re-scheduled, with three first class games now before the first of five Test matches. A bit of leeway had been found in the schedule with the cancellation of the proposed leg of the tour in Bangladesh.

  Monday 12 November 1984

  We had the best part of a day in Bombay before the evening’s flight to Jaipur, so I decided to make the best use of it by visiting the Overseas Communications Service.

  Once I had tackled the problem of the form-obsessed receptionist and queued for the overcrowded little lift to the eighth floor, things went extraordinarily well. The director, who I was sent to see, was a handsome woman in a sari, who was immediately sympathetic to my requirements and fully grasped the fact that our circuit bookings had all had to be re-arranged with the itinerary changes in a way that left all her male assistants standing. A meeting, which on past experience I had expected to take over an hour, lasted ten minutes. My confidence was boosted.

  India never fails to surprise.

  Our run-up to the first Test, back in Bombay, consisted of three-day games in Jaipur and Ahmedabad, with a four-day game in Rajkot.

  Jaipur provided a pleasant setting for our re-introduction to India and most of us were able to make some time for sightseeing in and around the Pink City, which has subsequently become something of a tourist magnet.

  Wednesday 14 November 1984

  The service to the press tent was attentive and willing, even if command of the English language was not always the strongest suit. The boy with the teatime sandwiches announced his arrival with a shout of, ‘Breakfast!’ which, for a few of our party, may have been accurate.

  I had been to Ahmedabad three years before, but a change of both ground and hotel were certainly not for the better. The new stadium, built on rubbish-strewn waste ground on the outskirts of the city looked unfinished and vultures cruised speculatively past the press box at eye level.

  The match there was against an Under-25 XI, captained by Ravi Shastri and included a player new to us, called Mohammed Azharuddin, who made 151. This match gave England their first defeat of the tour – by an innings – and was a rather bad-tempered affair. Towards the end, as England were well into the final slide to defeat, Pat Pocock, the last man in, commented to the over-enthusiastic young wicket-keeper, ‘Look, mate, when I nick one, I will walk.’

  Big airport welcomes had been a feature of the tour three years before and we witnessed the first of these on this tour at Rajkot, in the far west of the country. They were pushing the boat out for the first visiting team since Douglas Jardine’s side in 1933-34. A big airport welcome was followed by a lavish and well-lubricated reception, even in the dry state of Gurarat.

  This being the last game before the first Test, on the Saturday it was planned that for Radio 4’s Sport on Four programme I should have a proper broadcast circuit instead of the very scratchy telephone lines that I had been using.

  Friday 23 November 1984

  In the morning two All India Radio officials came to me in a great state of excitement, with the usual problem that the next day it would not be possible for me both to hear London and talk to them.

  As contributing to a live programme would therefore be impossible, I protested.

  I was taken to Rajkot telephone exchange, where I sat in on my first meeting conducted entirely in Gujarati. Eventually I decided to stick in my two pennyworth in English, and it must have carried the day. All would be well tomorrow, I was assured.

  Saturday 24 November 1984

  It all worked! Apart from my match report and on-air chat to Cliff Morgan, I heard Tony Lewis in Bombay, reporting on his golfing activities. Always reassuring to know that the commentary team is assembling.

  The other thing I remember about that match in Rajkot, played on a shirt-front of a pitch, was that the West Zone’s captain, Dilip Vengsarkar, then one of the rocks of India’s batting line-up, made 158 and did not take the field when his side bowled. Sensing an injury story just before the Test, I went to ask him what the problem was. ‘Oh, I just didn’t feel like it,’ was his nonchalant reply.

  Rajkot does stick in my memory for a few reasons – not all good. An intermittently updated scoreboard made live radio reports a problem, particularly when it refused utterly to post individual scores. But I did see the following entry in my diary for the final day.

  Saturday 24 November 1984

  I had bidden farewell to the helpful and friendly staff of the telex office in whose company I had spent so much time waiting for calls to be connected and peering between policemen’s heads to see the scoreboard.

  Especially memorable had been the moustachioed messenger who had come to fetch me from the press box every time that I received an unscheduled call from London. He would salute me and address me as ‘Peter Sahib’ every time our paths crossed and would guide m
e with a great air of pomp to the telephone, indicating to any friends of his who passed that he was on important business for the BBC. This just may have had something to do with the several rupees which had crossed his palm.

  And there is one other entry from that leg of the 1984-85 tour, to highlight the fascination of travel within India.

  Sunday 25 November 1984

  As we approached Bombay, two of our party were invited into the plane’s cockpit. They were somewhat alarmed when the captain made the usual request for clearance to land and there was a stunned silence from the control tower.

  Then, ‘Who are you? We know nothing of you. Go away!’

  In the body of the plane the rest of us knew nothing of these exchanges, which apparently persisted until the pilot suggested that his fuel was running low. We just enjoyed repeated views of the Arabian Gulf, the Bombay suburbs and the Western Ghats. At last we got down.

  And then it was into the usual preparations for the Test, as the press party swelled. In the evening two days before the Test we all – players and press – were guests at a very convivial and relaxed drinks party given by the British Deputy High Commissioner, Percy Norris, at his residence.

  Tuesday 27 November 1984

  The first engagement of the day was a series of group photographs – players and press – for the traditional tour Christmas cards. The gathering was followed by the manager announcing an unscheduled team meeting for his players just as they were due to be heading off to the nets.