Can Anyone Hear Me?

by Peter Baxter

  During the course of the meal, Bob Taylor and Bernard Thomas, the physiotherapist, encouraged me to try paan – betel nuts wrapped in a leaf.

  ‘Keep chewing, it gets better,’ was Bob’s mischievous advice. It doesn’t. It gets considerably worse and at last I saw the amusement on their faces, showing that they knew this.Keith Fletcher, the captain on that tour, would usually have to introduce his team publicly to whatever VIP was hosting the reception. Being someone who can never remember a name, this was something of a torture for him, but it gave his team a great deal of fun, as they waited to see if he would forget who they were.

  It is inevitable that you get to know the captain best, as you are going to interview him more than the rest of his team. Fletcher was brought back to captain this touring side, having not played a Test for four and a half years. He followed Mike Brearley, who had returned to replace Botham in the previous English summer but had made it clear that he was not available for the winter tour.

  I always found Keith a very good man, though I am not sure that the way in which he was able to bind together an Essex side to win its first County Championship was quite so successful at international level, and he must surely have found it difficult to come into the side that had just won the Ashes, when he had been out of Test cricket for a period. I went on to renew dealings with him when he later became England coach and I can remember interviewing him in various hotel rooms as he indulged his hobby of tying elaborate fishing flies.

  Five of Fletcher’s next six successors as England captain were on that 1981 tour and at the time it was being suggested that Geoff Cook, then captain of Northamptonshire, who did not get a Test match until the seventh of the tour, the one-off Test in Colombo, might be the next candidate for the job. The role he played in elevating Durham to a Championship-winning side might suggest that he would have been a good England captain, if only he had the runs to back him up. He was on standby to make his Test debut in Madras, where Ian Botham was due to have a fitness test on the morning of the match. He was fairly late in the bar the night before, when his concerned room-mate, Derek Underwood, appeared to remind him that he might be playing next day. Geoff pointed out – accurately as it turned out – that there was no chance that Botham would not play.

  As it was, it was the vice captain on the tour, Bob Willis, who took over the captaincy at the start of the next English summer and took the team to Australia for the next tour. His occasional interventions in India were telling. Doing an interview with me when he was leading the side in the up-country match at Jammu, he expressed his exasperation with David Gower, whose rapid scampering down the pitch had led to a spate of run-outs. ‘That’s not a dismissal I have very much time for,’ said Bob. Then, in Sri Lanka, his dressing room lecture was reckoned to have triggered England’s only Test win of the tour. By the next England Test, having turned down the rebel trip to South Africa, he was captain.

  Geoff Boycott, it subsequently transpired, had been at the heart of the planning of that rebel tour, though the players who went on it were to elect Graham Gooch as their captain. Fletcher cannot have found the presence of Boycott easy in India, and he also had the man who had started the year as captain, Ian Botham, there. Certainly a couple of members of the team suggested to me that, rather than a united team, they were fifteen players plus Boycott. His hundred in Delhi gave him what was at that stage the highest Test aggregate in the world and it also drew him level with Wally Hammond and Colin Cowdrey in the number of centuries scored for England. But he was to play no further part after the following Test in Calcutta.

  The 24-year-old Mike Gatting, with his pudding-basin mop of hair, was increasingly frustrated at the fragility of his position as an all-rounder in the side, though he did play in five of the seven Tests.

  Graham Gooch and John Emburey and their wives were a constant foursome. Most of the wives who came on the tour saved their appearance for the more relaxed end of it in Sri Lanka.

  Those who did not make it into the Test side were frequent visitors to the commentary box as expert summarisers, along with the manager. That was a practice that I only used regularly on that 1981 Indian tour, with the notable exception of the emergency recruitment of Vic Marks in Delhi in 1984.

  After the experience of being cheek by jowl with the players in India, there was a different feel about the tour of Australia in 1982, though I did find myself being mistaken for one of them in Melbourne. The previous winter, young Indians had tugged my sleeve, apparently thinking I was Mike Brearley. Now, on my way to the MCG, I was asked to sign an autograph book as Bob Taylor. A week after that, in Adelaide, I was pursued by another autograph hunter.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’m not Mike Brearley and I’m not Bob Taylor.’

  ‘No, I know that,’ said the slightly bemused man. ‘You’re Vladimir Ashkenazy, aren’t you?’

  The old practice of the Christmas Day drinks party given by the press for the team was part of an Australian tour until 1994. The manager on that tour, M.J.K. Smith, seemed very reluctant to have his team enjoying our hospitality and by the next visit to Australia the tradition had rather sadly ended.

  It was simple enough in 1982. We all gathered round the hotel pool. The Daily Mirror correspondent, Chris Lander, and the photographer, Graham Morris, dressed up in tail coats to act as waiters – and Messrs Botham and Lamb duly threw them in the water.

  Allan Lamb was a great integrator with the press, just taking everyone as he found them, even when there was a management warning out to be wary of too much contact. (I can remember giving a young player a cheery ‘Good morning’ in a hotel lift in Australia and being given a terrified look in return, as if I was about to swallow his soul.) ‘Lamb’s Tours’ became something of a feature on tour, as his entrepreneurial spirit would find an expedition worth doing in the most unpromising of places.

  In India on the 1984–85 tour he was sent on one occasion down to the boundary to replace Phil Edmonds, who had been having problems fielding there. Lamb was able to entertain an unruly crowd who had been beginning to get under the Edmonds’ skin.

  Lamb was the vice captain on the 1990 West Indies tour. In the hotel pool in Guyana, when another day’s play had been called off for the waterlogged outfield, he was letting out his usual high spirits in loud and extrovert fashion. I was with David Gower, who was broadcasting with us and writing for The Times. We watched Lamb’s antics and I saw a smile on David’s face.

  ‘It would only take a broken finger and we’re looking at the England captain,’ he said. And we both laughed heartily. Within a fortnight it had happened and Allan Lamb replaced Gooch as captain for the last two Tests of the series.

  The 1984 India tour was my favourite to a large extent because of the players who were on it. It was in David Gower’s character to tolerate independent thought in his team. He had held out for the inclusion of two who probably would not have been there on the selectors’ say-so alone – Phil Edmonds and Mike Gatting. He made the latter his vice captain. Both were to have considerable influence on the success of the tour.

  For all the laid-back appearance, Gower can have a short fuse when he thinks he is being messed around. An informal rest day press conference in Madras turned sour when he was pushed about the decision to employ two nightwatchmen before he came in himself at seven. From my point of view, interviewing him was never a problem. In later years interviews with the captain were rather rationed to before and after a Test unless he himself performed spectacularly. David was always prepared to talk if there was no other obvious candidate.

  Left out of the touring team to the West Indies in 1990, Gower was there anyway, doing a column for The Times and summarising on Test Match Special. After the injury that Gooch suffered in the Trinidad Test, David was summoned to the colours for the game against Barbados, which preceded the fourth Test there. Although the management played down the possibility, it was clear that,
if he made runs, he would be likely to play in the Test. As it was, he only got one innings and made four. But I did present him with his TMS tie in the nets.

  At the end of that same year, included in the England team again, but clearly disaffected with the new ethos, he approached me about the then vacant job of BBC cricket correspondent. We walked round the boundary of a practice game in which he was playing to talk it through, but I could not see him – as I told him – waiting in dressing room corridors for prima donna cricketers to give him an interview.

  The majority of the players on his 1984–85 tour of India had had the benefit of either public school or university education and I remember speculating about whether the advantages gained from those better sporting facilities might make that the norm for future England teams. That has not really proved the case until quite recently.

  It is probably no coincidence that several members of that touring team went on to join Test Match Special. Most notable, of course, was Jonathan Agnew, who actually arrived at Christmas in Calcutta as the replacement for the injured Paul Allott. Allott himself, having cut his teeth with us in India in 1981, did a tour of the West Indies working in the TMS box in 1994. Mike Atherton was captain by then and I recall sign language between them, which was translated by Allott to give us an insight into the captain’s thinking in the field.

  Vic Marks’ debut in Delhi was, as I told him a few days later when we were having a Christmas Eve beer in Calcutta, always going to be the start of a new post-playing career. His wife, I am afraid, was not keen on that idea then, so my belated apologies to Anna Marks, but Victor has been a jewel in the crowns of both The Observer and Test Match Special.

  He and Aggers formed part of a TMS teatime feature I started soon after that trip, called ‘County Talk’. The third member was also on the tour – Graeme Fowler. ‘Foxy’s’ ebullient and irreverent personality made a good contrast – as did the Accrington humour. I remember him making a point of travelling on the press bus on one sight-seeing excursion in India, in order to talk to the photographers in our party about the techniques of using his new camera. And he has contributed a quotation which appears in most anthologies of cricketers’ sayings: ‘It’s Friday night. What the hell am I doing in Ahmedabad?’

  Another team member who would go on to join TMS was Chris Cowdrey. I was obviously very disappointed when he decided to throw in his hat with Talk Sport, but I know that he had the ambition to move his radio career from expert summarising, at which he was excellent, with a nice, light touch and quick wit, into the job of the ball-by-ball commentator.

  In commentaries on county knockout matches subsequently, I also used the likes of Paul Downton, Richard Ellison and Pat Pocock, who were all vital parts of David Gower’s team.

  Gower himself, as captain, had a successful Ashes series at home in 1985, followed by suffering a whitewash in the West Indies. When that happens, critics are hard on a laid-back style. His replacement by Mike Gatting would not be long delayed.

  Mike and Micky Stewart were a very close-knit captain/coach combination and it is possible that that closeness allowed an understandable outrage at some of the things that went on in Pakistan at the end of 1987 to overcome what might have been a more cautious path of diplomacy. Still, I could not help but admire the straightforwardness of ‘Gatt’.

  The tales of his capacity to eat are legion and he does not deny them. So I don’t think I am breaking any confidence by saying that, when I went to his room for an interview during the height of the Faisalabad confrontation with Shakoor Rana, I saw on the desk the largest jar of Branston Pickle I have ever seen anywhere. He did not object to my laughing at it.

  Gatting’s openness could get him into trouble, always saying a little bit more than would be wise in the face of a voracious press. When Graham Gooch took over he had learned that lesson. When I joined the 1990 tour of the West Indies in Trinidad it had been going for a couple of weeks already. I went to one of the captain’s press briefings on my first day and found that he was certainly not going to give anything away.

  As we left the room, one of the journalists moaned: ‘That’s what it’s been like. He doesn’t give us anything.’ I could not help feeling that, while it might not help our job, it was only wise for Gooch.

  Graham was utterly dedicated to driving himself to physical fitness. I came across him bursting out of the door from the fire stairs on the twelfth floor of our hotel in Jamaica, having run up them several times and on his way down to do it yet again. Still I got a breathless ‘Good morning’. Not all his team quite embraced his work ethic all the time. Most notably there was never a meeting of minds on this with David Gower.

  And he probably would not have been unique among captains to have torn his hair out over Phil Tufnell. In Visakapatnam, on India’s east coast, in 1993, I came across Vic Marks at breakfast on a Saturday morning. I asked if he was fully geared up to fill the space he commanded in the next day’s Observer. ‘I’ve got the feature done,’ he said, ‘and I’ll be all right, provided Tufnell doesn’t take none for a hundred and get fined for bad behaviour.’

  Prophetic words. Tufnell had a bad day with the ball and did indeed pick up a £500 fine, so that the next morning’s Observer had articles on facing pages expressing the reasons why he must and must not play in the next Test. As it turned out, that day Tufnell bowled beautifully and picked up four wickets.

  Subsequently – and since my retirement – Phil has been one of the recent successes of Test Match Special, closely guarding the secret that he is not the fool he likes to pretend he is.

  Gooch’s successor, Mike Atherton, took the policy of never volunteering any information even further, frustrating journalists at press conferences, though I always found him easy enough in the one-to-one situation of a radio interview. A practice grew up at this time, treated warily by the press, of having the radio interview lead the press conference. In some circumstances, as far as we were concerned, it was the only way we were going to get our interview and I could see that, for a harassed media manager, it made sense in his attempt to get the captain or selected player in and out of the press conference as quickly as possible.

  It was not ideal for us, but better than having a grumpy captain feeling he should not have to answer the same questions over again. I found on occasions that the writers would have few questions for Atherton when I had finished. He would appear to be quite amused by the notion that he might have intimidated them. And yet he was one of the most delightfully honest captains I have dealt with. I came across him having a quiet beer in the bar of our hotel in East London, South Africa in 1996. England had just lost yet another one-day international and instead of taking the short journey back in the team coach, Mike had opted to walk the direct route through the cemetery. I saw he had taken the precaution of turning his shirt inside out. ‘It would be too good a photo opportunity,’ he said with a wry grin. ‘The Atherton shirt walking through the graveyard.’

  When Mike started on Sky and writing for the Telegraph and then The Times, there were still some in the press box who seemed to have been scarred by their time trying to get a word out of him. But if anyone is his own man, it is Mike Atherton.

  Alec Stewart had probably seen enough of his predecessors in action to appreciate the potential pitfalls. He had a very friendly relationship with the press, while not actually giving away too much, and he is another who has gone on to be part of a few radio teams on both Five Live and Test Match Special.

  Nasser Hussain’s approach was intriguing. I would not have thought it was in his nature to embrace the media, but, as Atherton’s vice captain in the West Indies in 1998, I found him encouragingly open and interesting to interview, often apparently volunteering to appear when there was no other obvious candidate. Soon after arriving in Pakistan in 2000, when he had become captain, I attended one of his press briefings. The comment of one of the journalists this time was
that he must be the best at a press conference since Tony Greig. Unlike the writer in question, I had often interviewed Greig when he was England captain, so I could make the comparison, which was probably fair enough, though in an entirely different style. I am sure that Hussain was more pragmatic about the need to do it and more controlled in what he gave away.

  He and Atherton have, I believe, been excellent on Sky, avoiding the blandness that has become a problem in, for instance, Australia’s Channel Nine commentary team. As Atherton must have found it strange – and certainly his first victim, Stephen Fleming, did – to be on the other side of the interview microphone, I found it interesting to be waiting with Nasser Hussain most evenings for the close of play interview in South Africa in 2004–05. The pair of us would often have to negotiate with the team’s media manager for the player we wanted. If Nasser found the position ironic, he did not show it.

  Nasser Hussain’s tenure as captain coincided with the appointment of Duncan Fletcher as coach. In Fletcher there was a very entertaining and friendly man in private, who put up an impenetrable public façade to deter those who might want to see inside the team ‘bubble’.

  Fletcher had the job of handling the fall-out from Marcus Trescothick’s withdrawal from two consecutive tours. Now the team management would be likely to acknowledge that the player was suffering from depression at an early stage, as happened in the case of Mike Yardy in 2011. Then, the fog of disinformation led to far too much unwarranted speculation.

  On the first occasion, in India, it had seemed odd when every gruesome detail of every other player’s internal health problems was being given to us, that this one was not. In Sydney in 2006, when we knew what the problem was, it was not revealed that he had gone until he had already left. A call very late at night had Jonathan Agnew broadcasting from the roof of our hotel on the eve of a very early departure for Adelaide.