Cricket XXXX Cricket (21 page)

‘How on earth do you girls walk around in things like these?’ he asked, showing me a black, size 9, diamond-studded shoe, with a modest half-inch heel. A man more at home in a pair of Nikes, he looked truly horrified when I assured him that before certain very tall ladies married certain very gnome-sized heirs to the throne, we all used to teeter around in stilettos six times as high.

It was all back-slappingly merry as Gauleiter David, whose clipped Teutonic tones implied vays of making us enjoy ourselfs, yah!, distributed the Christmas presents. Wilf Slack was given an instant Archbishop Tutu outfit, comprising gold horn-rimmed spectacles and a dog collar. David awarded himself a tube of champagne toothpaste, and Lawrie received some of the rum-flavoured variety. Micky was given a can of disintegrating bull-shit, certainly no reflection on his generally sagacious counsel, and Peter Austin snapped up his copy of
Wicked Willy’s Guide to Women
with obvious fervour. Gladstone, who apparently cannot swim, was given a pair of water-wings and the manager was presented with a beer gut ruler. Gatt, inevitably, was quite overburdened with diet books, copies of the
Australian Gourmet
magazine if these failed, and a special alarm clock in the form of a candle, the operating instructions of which would be better left to the reader’s imagination.

Bill Athey was awarded a rubber brick, on which, in the future, he could vent his frustrations. Chris Broad got a book on the natural superiority of the left-hander, and Graham Dilley, a heavy smoker, received a cigarette in a case bearing the legend ‘In an emergency, break glass’. Mr and Mrs Manager were apparently thrilled with their His and Hers mugs. Bruce French, who, apart from hardly playing a game this trip, has also had the misfortune of ending up in a Tasmanian hospital with an acute chest infection, accepted a copy of
How to Survive in Australia
with cheery stoicism.

The Fosters eyed their ‘Fundies’ with some alarm – an intimate piece of underwear with holes to accommodate four legs at once. Phil accepted the various tomes on terminal hair loss with relatively good grace, as indeed he did the game How to Become a Billionaire. (Answer included inside: a screw, and underneath the word ‘everybody’.)

Ian Botham, unaccountably, was presented with a game entitled Grass, and his wife Kathy, who had recently appeared modelling in the
Sun
, was presented with a pneumatic set of Samantha Fox-esque boobs.

Gradually, the humour began to degenerate along somewhat more lavatorial lines. There was plenty of farting foam knocking around, not to mention various pairs of edible knickers (piña colada-, rum- and banana-flavoured). A pet cock was also presented, together with a copy of
100 Games to Play with your Pussy.
For the well-endowed (I am obliged to accept this on hearsay) there were elephant-trunk undies, and for the once-endowed but clearly no longer so, there was a patented virginity restorer, together with the message ‘Crude, horny tramp! When will I see you again?’

To general acclaim, Peter Austin was granted a
summa cum laude
‘Dirty Old Man’s Certificate’, and little black books and large black condoms were also distributed. It was then that some idiot gave Both a can of bright green hair spray . . .

Meanwhile the Australian team was, presumably, enjoying a traditional Christmas smoulderingly resenting the in-laws, and silently wanting to strangle the kids.

The next day, Boxing Day, the remarkably successful Dilley was unfit to play in this, the fourth Test, and was replaced by Gladstone Small, who amply rewarded selectorial confidence with a haul of five wickets in the Australians’ first innings, and was to end up with the Man of the Match award. The Australian selectors came in for the expected criticism, and were generally berated for playing batsmen who could bowl a bit, and bowlers who could bat a bit, and generally fielding a side, as Mike Gatting aptly described it, of bits and pieces players. Those who had not already fallen to bits, looked likely soon to fall into pieces. Certainly, none of the England team could understand quite why the best Aussie middle-order batsman, Greg Ritchie, was omitted, only to be recalled as an opener for the next Test in Sydney. It was in all the same sort of incomprehensibly erratic selection policy which had so hallmarked England’s jittery selectors in the West Indies, and in the following season, against India and New Zealand. It is the hokey-cokey school of selection; put a man in, take a man out, and generally just shake ’em all about, an empirical approach to a problem rather than a concentrated effort to solve it.

Suffice it to say, England won the match in two and a half days, thus taking an invincible two–nil lead in a best-of-five series, and retaining the Ashes.

Most players had long since returned to the hotel from the booze-sodden dressing room by the time Phil tipped up, a good five hours after stumps were drawn. By about nine o’clock, tired of waiting for the conquering hero to return, I went downstairs to hail a taxi and go to Chinatown for dinner with Peter Roebuck and Matthew Engel. Suddenly a car screeched to a halt, Fittipaldi-style, outside the hotel, and who should emerge but Both, Both’s dad, Both’s agent, Elton John (looking impeccable in a light grey, double-breasted silk suit, which had somehow managed to absorb a magnum or two of dressing-room champagne projectiles and still look good) and Philippe-Henri.

It was perhaps fourteen years since I had last seen Phil well and truly plastered. On that occasion, an all-male Cambridge University dining club, The Drones (a wonderfully suitable title, reflecting on the members), had been busily giving it some hammer at the Pink Geranium. Phil is a large man, so large that if it should one day occur to him, similarly smashed, to wander round Epping Forest, people would probably queue up to claim sightings of the Missing Link. In physique, to put it bluntly, he is in the Neanderthal mould, which coincides with the majority of his attitudes.

In those days, however, I used to be quite glad to see the old boy, though on one occasion not sufficiently be-rosy spectacled as to welcome the sight of him creating uproar at four in the morning, very much under the influence, and in an all-women’s college from which men were officially disgorged by midnight.

He had hopped over a few walls, sidestepped a few porters and come to wish me good night. You better believe it! By this stage he was incapable of doing much else. I was awakened by the splintering sound of a door being cloven in two, as Edmonds tapped for admission.

It was difficult to know what to do with fifteen stone of inebriated, if not unaffectionate, stupor. Any attempt to get him out past the porters again was to risk certain discovery. Besides, there was no way he could be let loose on the Huntingdon Road and the good townies of Cambridge. To allow him to stay, on the other hand, was to court an entire women’s college’s nocturnal disruption. En-suite bathrooms are not a feature of undergraduates’ rooms, and New Hall was quite obviously about to witness, albeit in regurgitated form, an entire Pink Geranium à la carte menu.

The decision was summarily taken out of my hands, as PHE, making valiant, if redundant effort to remember some of the no doubt sparkling conversation to which he had been party that evening, opened the window, and decided on an exquisitely executed expectoration on to one of the college’s prize herbaceous borders.

New Hall is a modern college, in the Frank Lloyd Wright mould, and the unmistakable sounds of much macho retching echoed hollowly around the white concrete dining-room dome, the magnificent goldfish ponds, the extensive waterways and the long open corridors.

Matters were in no way helped by the fact that my tutor lived immediately above me. The tutor to which a Cambridge undergrad is assigned is generally of a totally different discipline from the one which the student is supposed to be pursuing. A director of studies directs academic performance, whilst a tutor is, putatively at least,
in loco parentis
, in charge of one’s moral welfare.

My heart sank as I heard the window upstairs being hurriedly opened. A light spilt into the external darkness. Edmonds, never a brilliant conversationalist until he met Mike Brearley, and in those days about as garrulous as a giant clam, suddenly would just not shut up. By now he was proclaiming a future of undying love and affection, joint mortgages, and shared American Express bills, and equal partnership in anything I might earn. I was keenly aware of some lady academic’s head projecting out of the window a mere one floor up, curlers poking out at all angles like so many tracking sensors, trying hard to ascertain the source of the demented warbling.

Eventually she pulled her head in. Phil immediately stuck his out. Aware of the continuing racket, she stuck hers out again. By this time seeing nothing, she pulled hers in again. By this stage we were at the crème caramel, coffee, liqueurs and After-Eight-wafer-thin-mints course of the disgorged menu. He stuck his head out again. Terrified though I was of imminent rustication, I could not help but see the funny side of it. The pair of them reminded me of that Swiss invention, where a little man with a feather hat and a little woman in a dirndl skirt swivel in and out of an Alpine chalet to indicate the weather forecast.

Now, fourteen years later, old Edmonds was doing a repeat performance. Wearing no shoes, ex-ophthalmic eyes revolving in opposite directions, he was hallucinating badly, and claiming sightings of P. B. H May, who as far as anybody knew was no longer with us, though admittedly it is difficult to tell.

‘We’ve won the Ashes. We’ve won the Ashes!’ he proclaimed loudly to the entire lobby.

I was for once the only person around to be dead cold stone sober, and extremely peeved to be so.

‘You’ve
retained
the Ashes,’ I corrected, prissily pedantic. It is easy to play semantics when you’re sober.

‘Yes, yes,’ rejoined Phil breathlessly excited. ‘This is the happiest day of my cricketing life. Yes, this is the happiest cricketing of my daily life. Yes, this is the happiest living of my cricketing day.’

I thought by then we had heard most of the possible permutations of the Edmonds exuberance, and decided to drag him off to bed before he could accost a vaguely alarmed Doug Insole with the Union Jack he had just acquired from some hanger-on.

Bravely carrying Phil’s cricket coffin was Elton John. Accustomed to travelling with an entourage of minders, publicity agents, chauffeurs, valets, dressers, and on occasion, the entire Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Elton had carefully packed Phil’s kit himself, with a degree of neatness rarely seen in the PHE wardrobe. As a gesture of gratitude, Phil in return had given Elton his cricket bat, which was in fairly pristine condition, at least around the middle.

From an Australian point of view, the fourth Test was, of course, a complete fiasco. After the usual drubbing of the selectors, the critics turned inevitably to the Australian captain Allan Border, or AB as he is generally known, and started calling for his blood. It was a classic case of déjà vu, reminiscent of the treatment meted out to his great friend, David Gower, while still captain of England last year. The analogy went still further. Both men, whilst copping the flak for just about everybody else’s failures, were performing well themselves. Although Border has not, by his own astounding standards, had a brilliant series thus far, there is nevertheless plenty of statistical evidence to support the argument that he is one of the best players in Australian cricketing history. In the past eighteen months, for example, since the start of the 1985 tour of England, Border has scored twenty-three first-class centuries, nine coming in Tests. During the fourth Test at the MCG, he managed to reach a thousand Test runs in 1986, following the 1,099 he notched up in the previous calendar year. The Melbourne Test also witnessed Border’s 3000th run scored in first-class matches in 1986. Considering that he is one of the few Aussies with a definite place in the team, it is difficult to ascertain quite with whom the bandwagon critics would have replace him.

We left everyone else to continue the party in Both’s suite, and went to our room on the tenth floor, Phil, confused, talking to the voice in the lift and ordering its invisible owner to come out of hiding and show himself.

I must say, he is so much more amenable and affable a character when he has had a few that I do wish he would do it more often. He kept reciting a little ditty to himself, a limerick I had composed to the Australian wicketkeeper, Tim Zoehrer. To say Zoehrer had had a bad game would be charitable. It had been appalling. Tim also has a reputation on the circuit for giving it quite a touch of the verbals, or sledging as it is more often called. At one stage during the match while Phil was batting, he was hit on the pad, and the ball carried to silly mid-off. Zoehrer and a few of the slip-fielders went into a loud and somewhat exaggerated chorus of appeal. ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Phil, to no one in particular, a broad smile expanding cheekily over his face. He had been adjudged out in Adelaide from exactly the same shot. ‘You’re not going to cheat me out again this time, are you?’

Young Zoehrer apparently went berserk. Mark Austin (ex-BBC newsman and now with ITN), who was listening to the entire scene from the Channel 9 control box, said he had never heard anything quite like it in his life. Phil, who is old enough to have played cricket with the likes of Thommo, Lillee, Marsh and the Chappells in their prime, had never heard anything quite like it either. Channel 9 has a microphone strategically planted right next to the wicket, so that TV viewers can hear the sweet sound of leather on willow, or the clickety-clunk of bails being removed. Fortunately, since few modern cricketers are wont to say ‘Oh, dear me! What a silly shot!’, or alternatively ‘Goodness! I should not have thought that was really out!’, there is a time lag button placed on the device so that the only commentary viewers ever receive is that of former cricketers in the commentary box, rather than any gloss from current cricketers on the square. According to David Gower, however, the watchdog of the button only pays attention to the proceedings
during
overs. If you really want to screw the system and scandalise the far-more-shockable-than-we-are Aussies, all you have to do is go up to the wicket
in between
overs, and whisper ‘BUGGER, BUGGER, BUGGER’.