Cricket XXXX Cricket (19 page)

It never rains but it pours. Not only was the cricket profoundly disappointing but then we heard that Britain’s
White Crusader
had been knocked out of the elimination rounds for the America’s Cup, and would therefore not be contesting the semi-finals. Far more of a shock to the world of twelve-metre racing was the elimination of the New York Yacht Club’s
America II
by young Kiwi genius Chris Dickson. Proving that Australian cricket captains are not the only breed of sportsmen liable to break down and sob, John Kolius, the NYYC skipper, could hardly conceal his emotion as he was obliged to concede defeat. After twenty-four successful defences of the Cup in the 132 years preceding
Australia II’s
1983 victory in Newport, it seemed almost inconceivable that the NYYC should be eliminated from the competition at such an early stage. For five of the eight legs of the course, Kolius looked set to keep the glimmering hopes of reaching the semis burning, but in the end the vagaries of the sea breeze, the moody Fremantle Doctor, delivered the death blow. Twenty million dollars’ expenditure and two years’ preparation down the New York equivalent of the Swanee, their syndicate spokesman nevertheless managed an attempt at humour. The NYYC, he stated, was considering suing the Doctor for malpractice.

The Bond syndicate’s executive director, Warren Jones, whose sense of history laudably outweighed any residual bitter memories he may have harboured of vicious squabbles with the NYYC over
Australia II’
s winged keel, went so far as to admit that he ‘felt quite sad about it’. Not half as sad as John Kolius, clearly, but an admirable expression of sentiment all the same.

Less melancholic were two Sydney ex-pats now living in New York, who turned up at the 142-year-old NYYC in their cups to offer the establishment a replacement one. The Club declined their alternative trophy. It was a wooden spoon and Aussie flag sticking out of an empty can of Fosters.

On to Tasmania. From the air, it reminded me of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Tasmania was surrounded by mists and icy water, a verdant green island mounted like an emerald in uncompromising black onyx. The white-capped sea looked fierce as we circled over Hobart, and thoughts turned to all those characters, a few sandwiches short of a picnic, who would set off on the Sydney to Hobart yacht race on Boxing Day whilst the rest of us were in bed nursing well-earned hangovers.

The Australians tell jokes about the Tasmanians the way the English tell jokes about the Irish, the French Belgians tell jokes about the Flemish Belgians, the Americans tell jokes about the Puerto Ricans, and everybody tells jokes about the Jews. The butts of the jibes are generally far brighter than the perpetrators, but there are nevertheless some good Tazzie tales worth repeating. For example, Tasmania is such a small and under-populated island that stories of inter-marriage, incest, cleft palates and clubbed feet are rife. Every Tasmanian is supposed to bear a scar, the resultant keloid tissue from the extra head the surgeons are obliged to remove at birth.

My favourite bad taste story is the one about the young man who came home one evening and told his father that he was not going to marry the girl next door after all.

‘And why not?’ queried the father, a friend of the fiancée’s family.

‘She’s a virgin,’ answered the son.

‘Then you are quite right,’ said the father. ‘If she’s not good enough for them, she’s not good enough for us.’

Spirits were high to the point of giddiness as we reached the manufactured Australian capital of Canberra to play a one-day fixture against the Prime Minister’s Invitation XI. A pillow fight erupted spontaneously on the bus and hitherto unspoken alliances demonstrated themselves more tangibly in the battle lines drawn. Beefy Botham at the back was immediately joined by Graham Dilley to launch a blistering attack on the front. There is, perhaps because of the blond wavy hair and the perennial sun specs, an uncanny clone resemblance developing between the two of them, and certainly Dilley seems smitten with no uncertain degree of hero-worship.

Canberra is one of those soulless cities specifically created as capitals to obviate the interstate rivalries of more obvious candidates. Neither Melbourne nor Sydney would ever agree to the appointment of the other, and so an entirely new place had to be put on the map. Few people seem wont to spend much time there, and a cross-section of population would probably reveal an average of about ten civil servants to every normal citizen. For a swift visit, however, the tree-lined boulevards are far from ugly, and the many manifestations of civic pride are suitably impressive. The new Parliament building currently under construction is causing no small degree of resentment, however, as price estimates are gobbled up with the speed of comestibles anywhere within the physical proximity of Mike Gatting. An exorbitantly expensive new flagpole is also causing ructions, and it is interesting to see how bureaucrats living in ivory towers succumb to excesses with the poor taxpayers’ money.

Spirits were still high even as the manager organised a three-line whip to round up the team for a cocktail party at the prime minister’s residence, The Lodge. It was, after all, only three days away from Christmas, and the festive spirit had already begun in earnest. The booze flowed freely, although reformed character Bob Hawke partook of none. A gifted cricketer himself, the Prime Minister takes great delight in spotting new talent, and his Invitation XI has been the launch pad for many young aspiring Australian hopefuls.

Of aspiring young Australian hopefuls there were indeed many, but not half as many as there were of press men, television men and camera crews trailing their coils of spaghetti wire behind them. Mr Hawke is certainly not unaware of the value of public relations, although whether constant hobnobbing with sportsmen of variegated degrees of brilliance is the right PR for a head of state or government is a moot point. Certainly I would not expect our own leaderene, Mrs Thatcher, to know who every member of the England cricket team was, which is fair enough. It is debatable whether every member of the England cricket team would know who she was either.

The cocktail nibbles were based on the Pritikin formula, a diet craze that has not yet hit the United Kingdom with quite the force it seems to have acquired here in Oz: ‘Pritikin’ baby pizzas, ‘Pritikin’ chicken balls and all the ‘Pritikin’ equivalents of the noxious junk we generally eat. The diet is simple enough: no fat, no salt and no sugar, and if Bob Hawke is anything to go by, it has a lot to recommend it. He is quite indisputably a charming man, not as tall as I had imagined, with thick, wavy grey hair and rugged, lined features which speak volumes for his pre-Pritikin days. A Rhodes scholar who rose through the Australian Council of Trades Unions (ACTU) to leadership of the Australian Labor Party, he was on election in 1983 hailed as Australia’s most popular politician ever. Three years in office had done plenty to put paid to such claims, and many people now feel he is losing the grass-roots support of the party. He has until 1988, however, to turn the tide of popularity in his favour once more, and sorting out the currently dicey Australian economy must remain his number-one priority. A treasurer who goes around shooting his mouth off about the country being on the brink of banana republicanism does not, unfortunately, tend to help Mr Hawke in this onerous endeavour.

There was much collegiate wincing in the ranks of the British High Commission contingent as Mike Gatting made his thank-you speech. Unlike the British press corps they did not so much take exception to the many ‘tremendouslies’ and ‘basicallies’, but more to Gatt’s constant and erroneous
lapsus linguae
in referring to the Prime Minister as the ‘Premier’. It patently takes more than Rhodes-scholar prime ministers to impress our chaps, but the best was yet to come. Phillip DeFreitas, perhaps a trifle confused by the putting green the Hawkes had just installed at the bottom of the garden, rang home excitedly to relate that he had just had the privilege of meeting Bob Hope!

The next day, a capacity crowd of 8,000 packed the Makuna Oval for the most delightful day of cricket this tour. Police in tracksuits and Charlie Brown hats, the usual cricketer mufti, mingled discreetly with the crowd, as the Prime Minister sat quite relaxed outside the members’ pavilion. It is difficult to think of too many countries in the world where this almost security-free movement is possible for a head of government.

A local radio station sponsor provided the skydivers who descended on the pitch to deliver the coin which the Prime Minister duly tossed before the start of play. Nubile young females in bikinis and shorts, sporting gaily coloured hats, sun visors and sun-deflecting parasols were much in evidence. It was a scorcher. Photographers wearing Foreign Legion caps, complete with protective back flaps, broiled lobster-red in the relentless sunshine. The pungent smell of meat barbecuing on the charcoal grills around the periphery of the ground hung heavily in the sultry atmosphere. Radio commentary references to the swimming pool end came as welcome aural refreshment. The ‘Jack Fingleton’ scoreboard, the only comprehensible scoreboard I have seen in Australia, stood stark and massive in its black-and-white simplicity. Scoreboards at the Melbourne and the Sydney Cricket grounds speak silent volumes of the thrusting technological developments that have so infiltrated the glorious summer game of late. As if the sight of Tony Greig and his Rexona Weather Wall (complete with temperature meter, humidity meter, wind direction meter, light meter and players’ comfort meter . . . whatever that may mean) were not sufficient to strike apoplexy into the more conservative breasts of NW8, these monumental sports stadia now boast scoreboards with more dials than the Concorde and more lights than
Sunday Night at the London Palladium
. There are instant replays, a source of often excruciating embarrassment to the often excruciating umpires. There are little yellow ducks that waddle on and off, blubbing, when a chap is out without making a score. There are advertisements for Diet Coke starring that most refreshingly extrovert of the Aussie cricketers, off-spinner Greg Matthews, and advertisements for the ‘Clashes for the Ashes’ starring ‘my dear old thing’ Henry ‘Blowers’ Blofeld, one of my favourite whimsical commentators. There is an instant statistical recall function, which will tell you everything bar a player’s inside leg measurement, but is probably even programmed to do that as well if requested. Often the only thing that interrupts the entertainment is the cricket being played out in the middle.

Gaggles of children, more intent on collecting autographs than paying any attention to the game in progress, clustered around the players’ enclosure.

‘Mr DeFreitas!’ shouted one precocious, if polite, ten-year-old with a spiky, lavatory brush crew cut. ‘Mr DeFreitas, please sign this for my autistic sister!’

‘I’ll set my wife on you,’ threatened Philippe-Henri, suddenly tired of his quota of requests. ‘You’re Emburey, aren’t you?’ asked one real aficionado, incomprehensibly proffering Phil a copy of Allan Border’s book for signature.

‘Edmonds,’ corrected Phil.

‘Yes,’ nodded the fan knowledgeably, ‘John Edmonds.’

In deference to the fellow’s patently encyclopaedic knowledge of the game and its exponents, Phil signed the book ‘Don Bradman’.

Meanwhile I was busily interviewing the Prime Minister outside the members’ pavilion. There is no doubt about it, he is a most approachable and personable politician. His current lifestyle, based on a strict regime – plenty of exercise, absolutely no booze and little sleep – has resulted in a certain Dorian Gray in reverse effect: past pictures of him look fairly decadent, whilst the current model looks extremely good. He is generous in his praise of the administrative team that supports him, and reckons that one of the lessons he has learned over the years is the ability to delegate combined with the intuition to delegate to the right people.

‘I’ve also learned how to catnap. During my time at the ACTU I often used to sleep through lunch, and even now I manage to catch the odd fifteen or twenty minutes’ catnap.’

I could sympathise with him readily. Sleeping through trade union lunches seemed the only sensible way of dealing with them.

‘What,’ I asked the Prime Minister, ‘were the differences between Bob Hawke, most popular Australian politician ever in 1983, and Bob Hawke 1987 vintage?’

‘Well, I’m older,’ he remarked wryly, a classic politician’s statement of the obvious, ‘and of course I am so much healthier than I was when I came to power.’

Mr Hawke has clearly learned, along with the Kissingers and the Thatchers, that relentless stamina, possibly even more than genuine genius, is the quality which stamps most achievers, and certainly the majority of politicians who make it to the top.

I asked him about that nagging issue of Aboriginal land rights. With state governments’ paltry track records, shouldn’t something have been done at federal level when he came into office?

‘You can’t
impose
policy on the states,’ he replied, ‘or else, as experience has shown, there will be a popular backlash against the Aborigines themselves. I think the Aboriginal people understand that.’

A skier from Gower hit the boundary fence for four. Hoping my dissent would be camouflaged by the thunderous applause, I hastened to differ.

‘What we really have to get right,’ added the PM, ‘is the economy. When we have sorted that problem out, there will be more money available for all these other policies . . . social and regional.’

That ‘when’, I suggested might well be the operative word. A recent survey had shown that Australia, once the envy of the entire world, was now the largest debtor country on earth after Mexico and Brazil.

Such statistics seemed to have a dampening effect on the interview, so we watched the cricket for a while, and chatted amiably to the British High Commissioner, Sir John Leahy, the most affable of diplomats, and not the sort of chap you’d expect to thump photographers at Heathrow. I left the PM to enjoy the rest of David’s innings in peace. It was, after all, Bob’s day off, and we were, after all, playing Bob’s own team, and no one, after all, would have asked Mrs Thatcher about Merseyside unemployment at her own son’s wedding.