Can Anyone Hear Me?

by Peter Baxter

  India won the two back-to-back matches, to square the one-day series.

  It was a slightly depleted party that went on to Sri Lanka after that. No Graham Gooch for England and no Jonathan Agnew for the BBC, after both had opted to skip that leg of the tour. Two one-day internationals were played, either side of a Test match. In mid-March Colombo was as hot as I have ever been in my life and Sri Lanka made short work of beating England in all three games.

  In the second one-day international in Moratuwa, a chaotic ground just south of Colombo, the wheels really came off the England effort, with batting, bowling and fielding all falling apart. A measure of how badly the news had been going down at home came in an interview with Bob Bennett, conducted down the line from London by Mark Saggers. Bob had to defend himself against a fairly savage bit of questioning, some of it rather ill-informed, based as it was on the mischievous picture-led stories from India.

  Despite the fact that my next visit to Sri Lanka had its trials, wrestling with the problems of covering a series with no commentary rights, I have always been very fond of the beautiful island. I was back there in 2002 for an enjoyable little trip to cover the Champions Trophy, split between two grounds in Colombo.

  A run of tours for which Talk Sport had secured the broadcasting rights was broken in 2001, when England went to India for three Tests before Christmas and then returned in the new year for a one-day series. After Talk’s coverage of three successive tours, we were suddenly flavour of the month in the BBC, even with people who had never been our allies.

  As a result, I was allowed to take an engineer on both legs of the Indian tour for the first time, and on to New Zealand afterwards. For me it was untold luxury, not that, as I see from my diary, it prevented me doing all the jobs at times – commentator, on the phone when the line went down; engineer, when he was called away to look after Pat Murphy on Radio 5; scorer, when our man for that tour, John Brown, was taken ill. In Ahmedabad I was even, to my considerable surprise, asked to do a couple of commentary shifts on All India Radio.

  But although having an engineer – Andy Leslie – was enormously helpful it did not mean that we completely avoided the usual hiccups. As, for instance, on the eve of the first one-day international in Calcutta.

  Friday 18 January 2002

  I had become aware that we would need different passes for this match from those issued by the Board of Control. When I went to the ground to secure these, though, I was initially refused entry by a senior policeman. Eventually an official said that I would get my passes if I came with a list of names at 3 o’clock.

  Now for the ISDN lines. I found a telecom official who insisted, ‘You have no booking. Delhi has no record of any booking.’ But after an hour or two of this stand off, a couple of engineers arrived who knew all about it, and twenty minutes later Andy was talking to London.Now I was back to the Bengal Cricket Association with my list of names for the passes. I was told to come back at 7, when the passes would be issued.

  When I did return, I found utter mayhem. The treasurer and assistant secretary were sitting in an office with a mountain of tickets, screaming hysterically at a large crowd of people, who were screaming equally hysterically back at them. This continued for another four hours.

  Hardly anyone was issued with any passes, and they tried to get me to go away with half the number I needed. It then became apparent that all the passes had to be taken to the police headquarters to be signed by the commissioner and of the last batch of 80, only ten had been returned, while 70 had been retained by the police.

  At 11 p.m. the TV people, waiting for 60 passes, were awarded 40. I left with six of the nine I had asked for and left a note with the cricket association treasurer of three carefully selected – and I hoped impressive – names who were still without: Sunil Gavaskar, Henry Blofeld and Angus Fraser. The treasurer promised to ring me overnight and amazingly at 1 a.m. he did so, telling me where the passes would be in the morning.

  In fact next day it was the secretary of the Indian board who had to sort out the remaining passes for me. That was the worst – but not the last – of the battles for passes on that tour.

  It was while awaiting a delayed flight during that same tour that Aggers and I were told that producing our boarding passes would get us a free meal. Hungry as we were, we hurried to take advantage of this offer, hoping to be presented with a delicious hot repast. We were somewhat crestfallen, then, when the man in charge of this bounty reached into a drawer of his desk and produced a grubby, unwrapped cheese sandwich, curling at the corners. We both declined, and he replaced it in the drawer, ready for the next victim.

  In that trip of six one-day internationals we zig-zagged round India on a routine of travel one day, practice and preparation the next and the match itself on the day after. Then the three-day cycle would start again. On the field, with four matches played, India were three-one up. Then England won by two runs in Delhi, where Nick Knight made a hundred and Ashley Giles took five wickets. In the last match in Bombay England won again, this time by five runs, with Flintoff pulling off his shirt to run round bare-chested after taking the last wicket to tie the series.

  Towards the end of the following year, England had their first Test tour of Bangladesh.

  Wednesday 8 October 2003

  We came at last through the rain clouds a long way into our descent into Dhaka. As a result, my first sight of Bangladesh was from little more than a thousand feet and my first impression was of an awful lot of water. There were swollen rivers everywhere, linked by flooded fields. Could there be 22 dry yards anywhere?

  An agent with not much English was there to meet us and take a small group of us press through the downpour to a minibus. When we pulled up at a fairly basic-looking hotel we all cried ‘Wrong one!’ but the driver spoke no English.

  It took some discussion at the hotel before we discovered that our agents in London had been told that until the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association had finished their conference in the city, this was the best we were going to get. It was a pity they had not bothered to tell us.

  With Dhaka being statistically the most densely populated city in the world, being in an hotel any distance from where the team were staying presented problems – and a lot of time stationary in traffic jams. In fact, estimating the time for any journey was an impossibility. It was quite normal for a theoretical five-minute trip to the Test ground to take an hour and a half. Thus it was good, not just from a comfort point of view, that we moved hotels within three days.

  The rain fortunately eased up before the business of the tour began. England were just given a little bit of a fright in their first ever Test against Bangladesh in Dhaka. They displayed some familiar frailty against sub-continental spin, so that, although they had taken a first innings lead of 92, by the fourth evening, when Bangladesh were 153 ahead with four wickets in hand, England were looking at the possibility of an awkward run chase on the last day.

  Saturday 25 October 2003

  A mournful youth was ushered into our little box first thing, proudly bearing on his pass the handwritten legend ‘BBC BOY’. He was there to help us, we were told, but a) it was the last day and b) he spoke not one word of English, so c) he was useless. Poor chap.

  We need not have worried about the win. It was wrapped up efficiently, taking another nine overs to bowl them out, with Harmison and Hoggard sharing the spoils. That left 164 to win and it took only 40 overs to get them.

  It had been decided by the programme planners before the tour that we should not mount a Test Match Special commentary on either this leg in Bangladesh or the one in Sri Lanka that England were moving straight on to. I had protested this, asking what I would say to the high commissioner of either country if they were to visit the commentary box during the Oval Test (not a completely unlikely event) and ask the reason for this snub.

  There was a partial climb-down
, but only for the Sri Lankan Tests and initially only to go on the fledgling 5 Live Sports Extra, the digital network, though Radio 4 did subsequently take the commentary.

  In Bangladesh I did encounter some disappointment (and a little affront) that we were not doing commentary, not least from the local commentary team, one of whom came into the little hutch that Simon Mann and I were operating from in Dhaka. He announced himself as ‘Bangladesh’s John Arlott’ and stood behind us, muttering a running commentary to demonstrate how good he was.

  Local officials told me that if we were not going to buy rights, we could not use the satellite dish to broadcast our reports at the ground. I therefore concocted an elaborate system using two telephones wired into our equipment, which thankfully was a modified success.

  From home, Jonathan Agnew rang to ask why our broadcast line did not sound as good as the one Jack Bannister was using on Talk Sport.

  ‘Because he’s not here,’ I said. ‘He must be reporting from his living room in Wales.’

  After the congestion of Dhaka, Chittagong felt pleasantly relaxed, though Simon Mann and I were billeted in a gloomy hotel called the Harbour View – a misnomer on both counts. We did at least find a rooftop terrace from which we could set up our portable satellite dish and get a good signal for our post-match reports. We had had to do the same in Dhaka, where the hotel manager had shown us the way through the plumbing in the loft to gain access to the flat roof. I thought there that we might have a problem when Bangladesh’s prime minister visited the hotel and the roof also became a vantage point for police marksmen. However, they seemed to be disarmingly trusting of us.

  That tour saw the start of the build-up to the winning of the Ashes in England in 2005. After that historic victory over Australia, England were off to Pakistan. That country was in the aftermath of the earthquake that had struck Kashmir a fortnight before England arrived. Practice sessions and the opening match at the Pindi Stadium were played under the flight path of relief helicopters heading north.

  The captain, Michael Vaughan, and his vice-captain, Marcus Trescothick, went on one of these missions in an RAF Chinook helicopter and the team visited the Islamabad hospital where injured survivors were being treated.

  Previous unrest and the situation in Afghanistan meant that the tour was largely confined to the Punjab, though there was a foray to Karachi for a one-day international. The first Test was in Multan, a new venue for most of us, which meant some more interesting hotel accommodation.

  Most of the press were in the Shiza Inn. Aggers and I checked in to adjacent rooms and, seconds after entering his, he gave a cry of anguish and was out again quickly enough to accost the porter who had guided us upstairs. Aggers had inspected the bathroom and found that instead of a European-style lavatory bowl he had been blessed with a hole in the floor. I checked mine while he was explaining to the porter that he was not up to using this arrangement for a week.

  His room was changed, but a few days later the correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph arrived and was offered this room as the only one still available. On finding that I was next door he enquired, ‘Are you a squatter or a sitter?’ The next day I saw him hurry towards me with a pained expression and so, without the need for an exchange of words, I handed him my room key.

  The Shiza Inn, finding itself under the considerable pressure of accommodating a large number of western journalists, went out of their way to try to help. As well-intentioned as their hospitality was, it would sometimes have been better if they hadn’t bothered. Spotting the fact that many of us were keen on an omelette for breakfast to get us through the day, they took to making a large quantity of the things and stacking them in a cold, rubbery pile well in advance of anyone arriving for the meal.

  Friday 11 November 2005

  At breakfast I struggled to get a warm omelette. Seeing my eventual relative success on this front, CMJ thought that he, too, would go for a freshly made one. ‘Without the bits, though,’ he said, eyeing the chopped up onions, peppers and chillies in mine.

  ‘Oh, sir, bits are complimentary,’ said the head waiter.

  When it arrived it had bits. ‘Bits are compulsory, Christopher,’ I told him.

  The hotel had a small, sparsely grassed courtyard from which we found that we could just get a bead on the satellite to broadcast. We were even able to run a power cable from a nearby washroom. The only problem was that it was infested with mosquitoes. I was required by Aggers and anyone else using the equipment in the evening to light up my pipe as an insect repellent.

  After a couple of days, however, this courtyard was taken over to erect a great coloured canopy for a wedding party. The hotel management were most solicitous in showing us to the roof and laying on electricity, chairs and a table, creating a new studio for us amid the drying laundry.

  The glory of the little satellite dish was our ability to broadcast from anywhere. When the team visited a local orphanage, we put Kevin Pietersen on to talk to Radio 5 Live from the playground; when Marcus Trescothick had to take over the captaincy from an injured Michael Vaughan in Multan, he was put on the air live from the stadium nets and when a domestic crisis threatened his continuation on the tour while we were en route from Multan to Faisalabad, we stopped the convoy of press minibuses (despite an unsympathetic group of writers) for Aggers to broadcast from the roadside.

  England collapsed in their second innings at Multan, when they looked certain to win. Shoaib Akhtar was the destroyer on the last day as they chased a modest target.

  In Faisalabad our accommodation was the Chenab Club. It is a relic of colonial times and not hugely updated, but they went to enormous lengths to provide wi-fi computer access for their journalist guests. It was perhaps reassuring to see the notice on the door of the dining room: ‘MAID/MALE SERVANTS, GUNMEN AND DRIVERS ARE NOT ALLOWED’.

  That second Test was drawn, but some big batting from Pakistan in Lahore took the final Test away from England.

  My final tour of India for the BBC began in February 2006, covering warm-up matches at the Brabourne Stadium in Bombay and in Baroda. A number of place names in India have been officially changed over the years since independence. Some have caught on and some have not. Baroda is officially ‘Vadodara’, but I never met anyone who called it that and, as soon as you arrive you are greeted by a sign advertising The Bank of Baroda.

  When Bombay was officially changed to ‘Mumbai’ I was about to set off on a tour to India. I checked BBC policy on this and no one – including the Delhi office – seemed inclined to rule, indeed, all seemed surprised to be asked. What I have found in subsequent visits to India is that no one – at least nobody I dealt with – calls Bombay ‘Mumbai’, although one Indian commentator told me that he grew up calling it Mumbai, but then his family spoke Marathi. Most, on the other hand, do call what was Madras, ‘Chennai’, so I suppose one should go along with that.

  It was in Baroda that we first became aware of problems with Marcus Trescothick, though their nature was a closely guarded secret. The fact that the rest of a fairly substantial sick list was being given to us in gruesome detail, meant the vague remarks about Trescothick sparked wild speculation. It wasn’t until several months later that his depression became public knowledge.

  Michael Vaughan was already on the injured list, with a recurrence of the knee problem that had kept him out of the first Test in Pakistan.

  Saturday 25 February 2006

  England lost the match to the BCCI President’s XI by eight wickets and by the close of play we had also lost Trescothick from the tour – on his way home for an undisclosed reason. England finished the match with Flintoff in charge.

  The injury list was obviously of some concern, because I saw the manager, Phil Neale, having a net. Afterwards it was Michael Vaughan who faced the press, wryly finishing his interview with me with, ‘If this carries on, you could get a game.’

 
Tomorrow we’re off to Nagpur for the first Test.

  Two days later, Vaughan’s knee had not improved and Flintoff was confirmed as the captain for the Test. Further, they had sent for a batsman from the England ‘A’ side in the Caribbean – Alastair Cook. The day after arriving on the tour, he was opening the batting for England – and doing remarkably well.

  Arriving at the hotel in Nagpur, I searched early on for a suitable site for the satellite dish. Swimming pool areas are often a good idea for this and – remarkably – this hotel said it had one.

  Sunday 16 February 2006

  The pool was – quite literally – a rubbish dump, full of builder’s rubble, including broken lavatory pedestals and old bits of pipe work, with a pig snuffling through it to see what he could turn up. Thankfully I found ‘the lounge’ – a room with not a single stick of furniture in it, but a handy terrace outside which faced the right way for the satellite.

  England had the best of most of the drawn first Test, but in Chandigarh they suffered an all-too-familiar second innings collapse and lost.

  While the also all-too-familiar problems of communications and passes had been moderately chaotic in Nagpur, in what purported to be the more sophisticated surroundings of the Punjab Cricket Association at Mohali, they were more deliberately obstructive. Passes were released gradually with great reluctance, and only when they had put the recipient up against a wall to photograph him. I had to go online to find pictures of those who were not making an early visit to the ground.

  While the telecom tests on the day before the Test match were ultimately successful, no line appeared on the first morning. We had a problem, because the line of sight for transmission to the satellite, if we needed that back-up, was directly behind us and there was no window or balcony on that side of the building nearer than three floors below our box. My cables simply would not stretch that far. However, we realised that the press box was way below us and I could just about reach a satellite point from the front desk of that.