Can Anyone Hear Me? (15 page)

After making 849, England drew that 1930 Test match. The threat to this one in 1990 was coming from the heavens. Rain started to fall on Kingston that afternoon and persisted heavily through the night. It washed out the fourth day's play entirely. Surely England's great chance of a win could not be denied them now, we thought.

Nervous early glances through the curtains were rewarded with clear skies. They were evidently anxious in London, too.
I got a call at 7.30 a.m., asking if I could get to the ground early to do a weather piece for the two o'clock Sports Desk, at 9 a.m. our time. That had been my intention anyway.

I found the bowler's run-up at one end still pretty soggy, but it had only just been exposed to the sun and I was reasonably confident that an hour of that would bring a dramatic improvement.

In the end, neither the weather nor the West Indies tail could deny England an historic win by nine wickets. I remember both captains being quite awkward to interview. Graham Gooch seemed belligerent over the apparent universal surprise that his team could beat the West Indies and Viv Richards' pride had clearly been wounded by this defeat. Happily both men were to become good friends in the commentary box.

I had to gather one other interview for my regular Saturday
Sport on Four
despatch. Tony Cozier had written beforehand that for England to win one Test, let alone the series, would be ‘a catastrophe too calamitous to contemplate'. I really had to record his view now. He chuckled and said that he had always been a fan of alliteration.

That Test was followed by the washed out match in Guyana and then in Trinidad England found themselves in a strong position to go two up, but the weather denied them at the last gasp.

From that heady position, they moved on to Barbados and Antigua, where the West Indies returned to their usual form and took the series 2-1.

In
November 2004 England embarked on a winter tour of southern Africa. They were to start with two one-day internationals in Namibia before moving on to five more in Zimbabwe and a full tour of South Africa.

It was the Zimbabwe element that was the concern. Trapped between politicians and the ICC, the cricketers were uneasy while, with the BBC banned from the country by the Robert Mugabe regime, we had our own problems to contend with.

We believed that they had been resolved when Jonathan Agnew and I, detached from the rest of the press and the England team, caught an evening flight from Johannesburg to Harare.

Aggers approached the immigration desk first. He saw his name on a list on the wall beside the official.

‘That's good news,' he said, cheerily.

‘No,' said the immigration officer, ‘It is bad news. You are banned.'

My name was there too and I was handed a deportation order and invited to sign it, an invitation which I declined. A
shadowy plain-clothes man was hovering and clearly making the immigration officer nervous. He suggested to the man in uniform that we should spend the night in the cells before leaving on the first plane back to Johannesburg in the morning. We suggested that on the whole we would prefer the transit lounge.

The previous few days had been beset by uncertainty as this leg of the tour approached. I had been in Namibia, covering the two games there. At the conclusion of the second one-day international in Windhoek, I interviewed the man of the match, Vikram Solanki, and was leaving the press conference to send the recording to London when the England media liaison officer, Andrew Walpole, told the assembled press men that he had an announcement.

Some of us, he announced, had been declared unacceptable by the Government of Zimbabwe. He read out a list of proscribed organisations. ‘The BBC,
The Times
, the
Daily Telegraph
, the
Sun
, the
Mirror
, the
Sunday Telegraph
,
The Sunday Times
and the
News of the World
.' With that and no added advice or comment, he went to board the team bus back to their hotel.

I asked for an interview with him or someone from the team management, but that was refused.

After reporting the facts to London I returned to the team hotel and found the players in the foyer, waiting to go out, but anxious to hear what was going on. It was slightly odd to find myself giving them a press conference.

There
followed an evening of many reports for several radio networks late into the night, while packing in between times, ready for an early departure.

In the preparation for the tour I had made sure that I had cleared our way with the Zimbabwean cricket board, who had indicated that despite the BBC being banned from the country we would be allowed in for the purpose of covering the cricket. To that end I had sent off all the visa paperwork to Harare. While the BBC was, we knew, banned, there was a random nature about the selection of papers also listed as being excluded. For instance, the
Daily Mail
, possibly Mugabe's most outspoken critic, was, it seemed, acceptable.

The original plan had been to meet Aggers at Johannesburg airport in the morning for our onward flight to Zimbabwe. Now it was clear that there was no point in doing that and we met instead at the Johannesburg hotel in which I had overnighted en route for Namibia.

During the afternoon came news that the England team had decided, in the circumstances, not to continue their journey to Harare and were staying in an airport hotel in Johannesburg. Twenty-four hours of rumour and confusion followed. Aggers and I booked ourselves on flights back to England, as the Zimbabwean government seemed utterly intransigent.

Meanwhile, the team, it seemed, were refusing to go to Zimbabwe unless all the press were granted entry, so the five one-day internationals would have to be cancelled. Discussions bounced back and forth. The chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board and his deputy were both in Zimbabwe already and the ICC were also taking a keen interest and exerting what influence they could.

At around lunchtime in Johannesburg the deadlock broke. There
was plenty of additional rhetoric from the Zimbabwean government, but essentially the word was that all the accredited media with the team would be allowed in after all. The team would fly to Harare in the morning for a series of one-day internationals, now reduced from five matches to four.

Flights had to be re-booked and so Aggers and I found ourselves on the 7.30 p.m. departure from Johannesburg – evidently arriving in Harare in advance not only of the team, but also of any notification of the change of policy.

The British Embassy man who had come to help us reported that Lovemore Banda of the Zimbabwe Cricket Union was on his way to the airport with the paperwork, though the sinister plain-clothes man declared that it would do no good unless the documents had been issued by the correct ministry.

It was an hour's anxious wait before the papers did arrive and suddenly the mood changed. A car and driver were waiting for us and, as we checked into our hotel, we were told that the chairman and vice-chairman of the ECB – David Morgan and Mike Soper – were waiting for us in the restaurant. The first glass they offered went down very well indeed!

The next morning we were broadcasting live from the roof of the hotel and then were off to get our press accreditation to operate in Zimbabwe. Everyone seemed to know about us, but we were still relieved of US$600 each for the privilege.

Then it was back to the airport, where a luggage trolley became our broadcasting base for live coverage of the team's flight
arriving. Aggers tried to explain to a bemused security guard that if he stood in front of the small satellite dish he might find himself accidentally sterilised – ‘No more kids!' he warned. After going away and thinking for a moment, the man returned, recognising a golden opportunity. With a huge grin, he spread himself in front of the dish.

The accreditation people had told me that I must also report to the Broadcasting Authority of Zimbabwe. They were on the thirteenth floor of a building whose lifts were out of order, which was a good start. It turned out that they knew about the satellite equipment and required prohibitively vast amounts of money – in US dollars of course – on a daily basis to permit it to be used. I thought it prudent to omit the information that we had already been using the kit.

Fortunately a BBC television news team had also arrived and had not been told about this licence demand, so my satellite equipment stayed in my room where the policeman down the corridor (who searched the room every day when I left it) could see it there unused. Meanwhile we used the television team's kit, though the man who had given me the original order rang a couple of times to check that I was not using our dish clandestinely. It seemed it was a good deal more than his life was worth to let me slip through the net.

On our last evening in Harare, before moving on to Bulawayo, the press were invited to a cocktail party given in our hotel by Zanu Patriotic Front, the ruling political party. It was a rather strange and heavy-handed charm offensive by the very people who a week before had placed a ban on half of us entering the country. The atmosphere was strained and in between the painted-on smiles, we were treated to several thinly veiled harangues about British policy towards their country.

Broadcasting
arrangements for the four one-day internationals – two each in Harare and Bulawayo – were fairly Heath Robinson, as most of the booked circuitry failed to turn up. At least we were only doing reports, rather than ball-by-ball commentary. By the time we reached the more relaxed atmosphere of Bulawayo, any tension had been dispelled and the TV crew, with no reporting to do during play, arranged for a magnificent tea to be supplied at the ground by their hotel – best china and all.

As we departed Bulawayo to return to Johannesburg I reflected that the first fortnight of this particular African adventure had been more eventful than most – and we still had a full tour of South Africa to go.

The saddest thing about this, my third trip to Zimbabwe, was the contrast with the previous two, or at least the first, when small hitches were there to be overcome. On such a short visit we had limited opportunity to see the full extent of the decline of the country, but it was still clear that it was not the happy place it had been in 1996, when land seizures and other restrictions were only a distant threat. Back then there were some hints of what was to come, though.

Harare's immigration officers seemed none too keen on letting journalists into the country, but issued each of us with 48-hour temporary visas, to be extended at the Ministry of Information within that time.

I was in something of a quandary over the equipment I was carrying and whether I could walk in with it, after hearing horror stories of Zimbabwe customs. The photographers were in a similar position. Graham Morris approached one of
the Zimbabwe Cricket Union officials, who were there to greet the team. ‘Go to the Red Channel and see what they want to do with you,' was his advice.

Despite all my equipment – not exactly hidden, in a steel case labelled ‘BBC Outside Broadcasts' – I decided to breeze through the Green Channel and see what happened. Nothing did.

I went to pick up my hire car. Showing me round it, the man from the Avis desk proudly indicated the spare tyre in the boot.

‘Not exactly over-burdened with tread, is it?' I commented.

‘Oh no, sah!' he said proudly.

I had offered Graham a lift into town and it was two hours before he emerged with no cameras and an enormous amount of paperwork. I had to get him and two other snappers to the British High Commission for documentation to guarantee that the cameras and even all the film would be removed from the country at the end of the tour.

That tour was memorable more for England's public relations disaster than for the problems of Zimbabwe, which were not yet very obvious on the surface, even though Robert Mugabe had already begun to clear his throat on the question of taking over white-owned land.

On the second evening in Harare the team and those of the press who had arrived so far were invited to a cocktail party on the splendid lawns of the British High Commissioner's residence. I witnessed the team coach, David Lloyd, being asked by some of the guests if the team would be able to visit a few schools and hospitals. ‘We're here to work,' was the rather sharp
response. It did bother me slightly, because a first full England tour to Zimbabwe must surely have something of a missionary role as well as the purely cricketing one.

A policy of no wives on tour had been decreed for the team in this spirit of being on business and with an all-too fresh memory of the previous winter's family attendance in South Africa. It did seem counter-productive, however, particularly over the Christmas period. For the first time in my touring experience, the traditional invitation from the press to the team for Christmas Day drinks was rejected by the management and (at least on any tour that I've been on) it has not been revived since.

(Incidentally, the presence of two David Lloyds – one the correspondent first of the Press Association and then the Evening Standard and the other the England coach – on the tours of this period gave rise to a few inevitable misunderstandings, with hotel rooms or airline seats being sometimes cancelled because officials would think they had mistakenly recorded the same name twice. In the way of things we all just used their nicknames. ‘Bumble' for the England coach, who would go on to become a Sky commentator, and ‘Toff' for the journalist.)

The Zimbabwe captain, Alistair Campbell, seemed to realise quite early on that there was a public relations advantage to be gained over the old colonial power. And he was shrewd enough to grasp it, with an early informal chat with the British journalists in which he subtly played on the relative approaches, implying a heavy-handedness about the England camp in contrast with his own side's more casual attitude. There were some on-field gifts presented to him, with England losing a couple of games in the run-up to the first international encounters. England's management did at least succeed in warning photographers off capturing their image
in the team bus in Bulawayo, which bore the legend ‘BULAWAYO GIRLS HIGH SCHOOL'.

The nadir for England came with the coach's notorious reaction to the end of the first Test in Bulawayo – what was then a unique outcome in Test cricket, being a draw with the scores level. ‘We murdered 'em,' declared Bumble, over and over again. He supposedly went on to have an angry spat with a member of the club hosting the match.

David Lloyd had at that time only recently left the
Test Match Special
team to become England coach and therefore was a good friend. This had the potential to make the situation difficult. I was also doing a book on this tour with him and Jonathan Agnew (the latter was covering the second half of the trip, which was to New Zealand). Some issues did need careful handling, but we got through without any personal rancour, even though
Out of the Rough
may not have entered the bestsellers lists.

On the fourth day of what turned out to be a rain-ruined second Test in Harare, there was a visit from the patron of the Zimbabwe Cricket Union – none other than the president, Robert Mugabe. The presidential palace is just across the narrow lane off which the Harare Sports Club opens.

The teams were presented to him on the outfield in the lunch interval and then the word came that he would like to meet the British press. I asked, more in hope than expectation, if we would be allowed to interview him. To my surprise, the request was approved. Henry Blofeld immediately said that he would like to do the interview. ‘How do you think I should address him?' he asked.