Cricket XXXX Cricket (20 page)

‘Percy Fender’ Gower incidentally won the Man of the Match award for that sparkling performance. It was, quite appropriately, a champagne bucket.

It was the day before Christmas Eve, and hot mince pies and Christmas cake were doing the rounds in the Ansett Golden Wings lounge as we waited for our flight to Melbourne. On this occasion, peace and goodwill to all men even extended as far as the press corps, and they too were allowed in to partake of the festal spirit.

We were staying once again in the Menzies at Rialto Hotel, where a disembodied synthetic voice in the lift, sounding disturbingly similar to Ted Heath at his most pompous, aggravatingly apprises you of every floor you reach. Surely the real Ted cannot have fallen so far out of favour as to be reduced to this? Voices in lifts, and omnipresent muzak penetrating coffee shops, restaurants and even the deepest recesses of the bathroom seem to be a common feature of Australian, indeed nowadays of most international, hotels. I find this constant noise nuisance perfectly infuriating, even tension-creating – surely the very opposite of the atmosphere it is designed to encourage.

It is quite possible, of course, that some people need constant external distraction. I was comparing notes with Lindsay Lamb the other day, and discovered that both Philippe-Henri and Lamby operate in the same way in the morning: that is, on the basis of maximum possible noise. Immediately on waking, they switch on both the television and the radio, just to ensure that neither is completely intelligible, and then, having woken up the sleeping partner with the resultant racket, they retire to the bathroom to read the paper in peace. Peace! There would be no need of peace if they had not unleashed the broadcasting babble in the first place.

Similarly, in transit more than half the team feels the need to keep the old Walkman plugged into the pinna, although the quality of conversation perpetrated by the other half proves this to be no bad idea. It often seems, however, that all this extraneous input is merely a substitute for any real cerebral activity. Myself, I have never been sucked into this Walkman craze. I far prefer to sit and think. Ideally, of course, I prefer just to sit.

Christmas Eve was spent putting the finishing touches to the costumes for the fancy dress party. Such a degree of painstaking effort, of finely focused attention to detail, of well-rehearsed strategy and orchestrated design, has certainly never been a feature of England’s preparations for a mere Test match.

We awoke on Christmas Day to open our presents. In the case of Les Edmonds this did not take long. Scrooge Edmonds had bought me nothing. Miraculously, all his credit cards expired two weeks after the inception of the tour, which is presumably why he wanted me along in the first place. Conscious of this parlous pecuniary state of affairs, I had bought him nothing in return. I am not a woman to embarrass a man in penury.

Festivities kicked off at eleven o’clock with a pre-luncheon cocktail party given for the team by the press.

Cynics in the team wonder whether this is a tacit act of contrition (without any accompanying firm purpose of amendment), for all the times the press has stuffed them over the past twelve months. Cynics in the press wonder why they should be wasting their money on a bunch of people who would rather do anything than talk to them anyway. Three Buck’s Fizzes apiece, however, and the twenty-four-hour yuletide bonhomie starts to flourish. ‘The Street of Shame’ moves swiftly into its production of
A Christmas Carol
, subtitled ‘The Big Sleep’, in honour of Mike Gatting’s now celebrated lie-in during the state match against Victoria.

Dominic Allen, whose mellifluous tones will be familiar to listeners of LBC Radio, is doing a splendidly stentorian job as narrator in setting the scene. There, in the middle of a Menzies at Rialto bedroom, stands a Menzies at Rialto lookalike bed, on which, covered completely by a large Menzies at Rialto duvet, lies an amorphous, heaving heap, which from time to time emits a loud, sonorous snore.

Littered around the bedroom are half a dozen breakfast trays piled high with, amongst other things, a couple of dozen bread rolls.

Buttons (presumably on loan from another pantomime, and anyway this has been written by the press, so who on earth expects the facts to be absolutely straight?) enters the bedroom carrying yet another breakfast tray. In a previous incarnation, Buttons may well have been Graham Otway of
Today.

Loud banging on the door and ringing at the bell ensues. Enter Burke and Hare, super-sleuths, looking for a titillating titbit, on this so far excruciatingly well-behaved tour.

Again, Burke and Hare bear more than a passing resemblance to Paul Weaver of the
Mirror
, and Graham Morris, freelance sports photographer.

Frantic efforts are made to wake the captain, but to no avail. For it is time for Martin Johnson of
The Independent
to have his own words come back to haunt both him and the dormant England cricket captain.

The Three Ghosts of English Cricket appear in sequence. First, the Ghost of ‘Can’t Bat’, played by Johnson himself. ‘Can’t bat’, says the Ghost to the snoring shapeless mound. ‘I used to dog you in your early years.’

Then the second Ghost of ‘Can’t Bowl’ appears, played by Peter Smith of the
Mail
, with his arm ostentatiously in a sling. He wants to know why Phil Edmonds never gets a bowl before tea. (Offstage a raucous woman’s voice is shouting, ‘Phil, you boring old fart!’ ‘It’s the wicked witch of the press box,’ they all chorus. ‘She’s been at the EEC wine lake again!’)

Finally, trying unsuccessfully to upstage everyone else, is Chris Lander of the
Sun
, usually Ian Botham’s ghost, now appearing, by his kind permission, as the Ghost of ‘Can’t Field’.

‘Do you have a sister?’ asks another member of the cast. An embarrassed, hushed silence suddenly descends over the entire audience, as everyone waits to see how that will be received in the Botham camp. Ghosts of Miss ex-Barbadoses Past still loom extremely large.

Next, there is a guest appearance by David Gower, doing a perfect take-off of himself clutching a bottle of Bollinger, tossing a coin, incomprehensibly murmuring ‘Peter May says this. Peter May says that’, and wandering on and off the set quite aimlessly lost. (Yet another Ghost, of West Indies Past.)

Suddenly, Mike Gatting (portrayed by David Norrie of the
News of the World
, playwright extraordinaire, and impresario behind this entire production), awakens. His face is white with fear. The three Ghosts of England Cricket have shaken him badly. He is, nevertheless, still extremely well padded with help from a few extra pillows. Terror, in this instance, had involved no weight loss. He promises that if the Ghosts will cease to haunt him, he will renounce all clichés during press conferences, and presumably all ‘basicallies’, ‘tremendouslies’, and ‘lads-doing-good-jobs’ as well.

It was good-humoured stuff, with that little didactic sting in the tail which relatively uncommunicative captains would ignore at their peril. Let us face it. Every pressman in the business needs his x hundred words by a deadline, and as the brighter Foreign Office spokesmen in delicate situations have learned, the more of those words you give to the majority of those as-lazy-as-the-rest-of-us journalists, the more chance
your
version of events has of percolating through.

Watered and humoured, members of the team then withdrew to change. Phil and I donned our jailbird convict outfits, complete with ball-and-chain and manacles, and descended to the function room. The entire Australian press and an avalanche of photographers was waiting for us all as we arrived. I told them we had come as Australians. When all is said and done, Aussies like to be reminded that they
do
have a cultural heritage.

People had gone to quite unconscionable lengths to come up with a winner. David Gower, secretary of the Social Committee, looked disgracefully good as a Nazi SS officer, and demonstrated a masterful dominance and discipline in conducting proceedings which six months earlier would have kept him in the England captaincy job. Boyishly slim in black leather jackboots, tight-fitting jodhpurs, with unruly blond curls springing from underneath his uniform cap, he looked every inch the ascetic Arian. An equivalent of ‘Disgusted from Tunbridge Wells’ wrote to the
Mail
deploring such an outfit, but coming from the reader of a paper whose views are not infrequently to the right of Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, we all found that quite amusing.

Vicki, David’s fiancée, instantly converted to a nun, looked most fetching, though the fag hanging out of the side of her mouth was a bit of a giveaway.

Mike Gatting emerged with a flourish of silk and feathers as a musketeer. ‘All for one and one for all,’ he shouted enthusiastically. It was abundantly clear that certain members of the England camp hadn’t the foggiest what he was talking about.

Pushed along in wheelchair by Gatt was Graham Dilley, leaving a foaming trail of bubbly behind him. He had somehow managed to excavate large holes out of a rubbery white bathing cap, and had pulled it close on to his head so that his own thick blond hair only appeared in sporadic tufts. He was also linked up to an intravenous drip of Bollinger, presumably to cut out the middle man. The press erroneously assumed Graham to be playing an intensive-care case, but far from being a common or garden patient, he was, in fact, impersonating our own dear Fender, whose golden locks are apparently going the way of PHE’s.

Chris Broad looked tall and dignified as a splendid Wise Man, the role he has played all tour in his stalwart opening bat position. Bill Athey, serious and meticulous by nature, made an excellent schoolteacher, and Janet, his wife, charmingly cheeky in a
very
short gymslip, was billed as teacher’s pet.

The Lambs’ appearance as the Sugar Plum Fairies created a commotion. I had watched Lindsay, whose stores of patience and application seem boundless, as she stitched the costumes by hand one rainy afternoon in Tasmania. From two pink T-shirts, an infinity of tulle and a couple of cans of spray glitter, she had managed to create tutus that would not have disgraced Fonteyn in
Swan Lake.

Lamby, on the other hand, who had refused to wear his coordinated pink tights, and was from time to time showing the odd flash of bare buttock juxtaposed with bright white jockstrap and whatever it encompassed, was presumably playing a middle-order Nureyev in
The Nutcracker.

Wilf Slack arrived as a sailor, but was shortly to be elevated to a more eminent position. Jack Richards looked fearsome as a Red Indian, and his wife Birjitta, disguised as Indiana Jones, the Raider of the Lost Ark, complete with Akubra hat and bullwhip, was confusingly androgynous.

John Emburey looked suitably devious as Rasputin, and Neil and Romany Foster came in dirty macs and plastic pigs’ heads, carrying grubby cigarettes and filthy notepads and purporting to be the ‘gutter press’.

Gladstone Small turned up as a very affluent-looking sheikh, with his Australian fiancée, Lois, as a very revealing member of his harem.

Bruce French, ever the Merry Man, took a leaf out of Sherwood Forest and came as his county compatriot Robin Hood.

Lawrie Brown swashbuckled in as a very debonair Errol Flynn, Tasmania’s favourite son and my posthumous hero after discovering one of his many villas had been named ‘Cirrhosis by the Sea’.

Peter Lush, who had been landed with the difficult letter Q on which to base his costume, made an excellent QC. Certainly, he has a portly and dignified bearing, somewhat like Rumpole of the Bailey, which inspires great confidence. Mrs Lush came as the Queen of Hearts, and their daughter Amanda, who has been out here for the duration of the tour working for PBL marketing, came as a well-padded American football quarterback.

Septuagenarian scorer Peter Austin was a riot, in nothing but cardinal red underpants and an old blue mac, purporting to be a dirty old man cum flasher. His wife Gill, complete with apron and curlers, made a brilliant
Coronation Street
Hilda Ogden.

The Botham family, complete with three children and nanny, hopped along as the Bunbury Bunnies, inspired by actor David English’s children’s books of that name. All dressed in handmade balaclavas and large, floppy ears, with blackened noses and whiskers stencilled on their faces, they made a charming picture. One-year-old Becky made not a sound as she munched her way through a quite considerable lunch for such a little tot. Paterfamilias Bunny Botham, magnificent furry extrusions sticking out of his head, and keeping the kids in check with the odd look, was quite a different animal in a domestic role few people ever witness.

By far the funniest entry, for my money, was Micky Stewart. Instantly christened as ‘Sieg Heil’ by the team for his rather less relaxed attitude to nets than that exhibited by last year’s assistant manager Bob Willis, Micky had elected to maintain the despotic image with a commendable shot at Julius Caesar.

It was unfortunate, however, that the theatrical costumiers of Melbourne demonstrated little in the way of classical education. It is doubtful whether any
civis romanus
worth his
sal
, let alone an
Imperator
, would have been caught dead in the baths wearing a synthetic, flaming carrot wig to support his laurels. Micky, whose imperial garb was every colour under the sun bar purple, looked hilarious, and a prime candidate for any
Carry on up the Forum
remake.

James Whitaker, in a thick black wig, a short black frock, fishnet tights and suspenders made such a brilliantly tarty Lolita that there were suggestions of sending him to work the Cross when we got to Sydney. Poor James. He has had little enough opportunity to do much else of note this tour. Phil genuinely rates him as an excellent young batsman, but sadly his one opportunity to impress, during the Third Test in Adelaide, did not come off. It would be comforting to think he might be given another chance next season.

The show-stealer, however, was without a shadow of a doubt Phillip DeFreitas, who minced in as a disturbingly epicene Diana Ross. In a curly black wig, a long, clinging red satin evening dress, diamanté accessories, a feather boa, and make-up courtesy of Lois, there was only a moustache between him and a hell of a pile of trouble.