Cricket XXXX Cricket (23 page)

‘And what is worse,’ he confided morosely, ‘is that I am even too old for an arranged marriage now. All the best ones have gone.’

We told Imran not to despair, and bought him another orange juice. Somehow it was difficult to avoid the feeling that he would finally make out.

Along the coast in Fremantle there was no shortage of gloom, doom and despondency either. Just about everybody was worried about the apparently unbeatable form of the New Zealanders’ fibreglass yachts, not least the mammoth fleet of American TV people who were petrified at the prospect of an Australian–Kiwi final. If the Kiwis were to beat Dennis Conner’s
Stars and Stripes
for the right to challenge for the America’s Cup, stateside networks stood to lose up to US$150 million in advertising revenues and telecast outlays.

Quite a deal of anti-Kiwi feeling was being generated by the Australians themselves, and at least one of the syndicates was making no secret of the fact that they would rather lose the Cup to Big Bad Dennis and the San Diego Yacht Club than see it carried off to Auckland.

Maybe Conner himself, who has openly questioned the legitimacy of the fibreglass hulls, started the ball rolling in earnest. Last week he was heard to dismiss a tenacious reporter, off-handedly: ‘I’ve already said “no comment”. What are you – stupid? Or are you just from New Zealand?’

The shopkeepers, hoteliers and restaurateurs of Freo are all in agreement, however. From a financial and tourist point of view, the final has to be between one of the Australian syndicates, and the Americans’
Stars and Stripes.

Depression, however, as you may readily imagine, was not the abiding characteristic of the England squad, as they boarded yet another plane for yet another transcontinental flight the morning after the final.

Spirits were still buoyant as we reached the Sebel Town House in Sydney. Beating the Australians has become a commonplace event, but beating the Pakistanis, and,
a fortiori
, beating our erstwhile drubbers, the mighty West Indians, albeit in a one-day lottery, was balm to last year’s wounded team soul.

Released from hospital after throat surgery, and awaiting our arrival at the hotel, was Elton John. His childlike and unsophisticated pleasure at being with the cricketers is both touching and endearing, and he appears to enjoy the camaraderie of this extended family. I wonder, sometimes, whether, despite his being surrounded by the usual superstar’s coterie, the life of the successful pop idol is not an extremely lonely one. Much press speculation is being expended on the reasons why his wife Renata left Australia halfway through his tour, and on why she was not in attendance by his sickbed in his hour of need. We leave such society gossip to the relevant columnists. All we know is that Elton loves us, and we all love him.

He was waiting for us in the lobby, barred by his ENT consultant from talking for ten days after having nodules removed from his vocal cords. Wearing one of his large collection of wacky hats (this one sort of fez-shaped in ersatz zebra skin), he was hopping Ariel-like through the reception area, holding a placard on which he had carefully inscribed the words ‘Great Result’.

It is an interesting mutual admiration society, that of Elton and the team. He likes being in their company, and they like being in his: symbiotic groupies, really.

The Sebel Town House is not your common or garden cricket tour hotel. In no way ostentatious, it is small, understated and discreet, but is nevertheless the favourite watering hole of many showbiz personalities, whose autographed photographs adorn the small and even excessively cosy bar. Megastars Dire Straits had even left a golden disc, which now adorns the lobby, in gratitude for the gracious hospitality and ‘nothing too much trouble’ service they had received there. Certainly the Sebel was a welcome change from all those vast and impersonal establishments we have been wont to rest our weary cricket coffins in. It put me in mind of my favourite London hotel, the Berkeley, in Knightsbridge, where swimming around in the rooftop pool one day, I spied a rather corpulent Henry Kissinger heaving, anonymously, in the one direction, and a recently married, unremarked-upon Dustin Hoffman racing in the other.

Sydney! This has got to be the most exhilarating city in Australia: the palpable buzz of business and commerce, the cosmopolitan zest of the place. Looking out over the harbour at the bridge and the Opera House, watching the myriad hordes of laser-boats, yachts, cruisers, ferries and hydrofoils, and hearing weather reports of Big Ben freezing up in London, it is not difficult to think in terms of emigrating.

The Australian selectors, now under quite intolerable pressure to produce a winning team overnight, have named a hitherto unknown New South Wales off-spinner, a certain P. Taylor, for the fifth and final Test, in ever more desperate efforts to salvage some pride out of the series. ‘Peter who?’ the headlines read the next morning. Suggestions abounded that the selectors had patently given up all hope of winning, decided to cut their losses and to save on airfares by selecting any local lad. The British press had a field day, implying that the selectors had probably been at the Australian equivalent of the pink gin, and had made a mistake by naming the wrong Taylor, Peter instead of Mark. In the press box people wondered out loud whether they had not gone for A. J. P. Taylor, although not all were sure whether this eminent historian was still alive. Aberrant though Australian selectorial policy had clearly become, selection from the land of the living was still thought to be the bottom line.

Former Test great Neil Harvey had already started calling for the removal of ‘unqualified’ selectors from the panel a few weeks prior. He claimed that none of them, with the exception of Greg Chappell, had been through the mill as cricketers. ‘Jim Higgs went through a tour of England without scoring a run,’ he claimed in a newspaper interview. ‘How on earth could he be a good judge of a batsman? Dick Guy played only a handful of games as a leg-spinner for NSW, and I remember Lawrie Sawle as a batsman for Western Australia who struggled to hit the ball back past the bowler.’

Harsh stuff indeed, although one assumes that a man who has himself served time as a selector, between 1967 and 1978, must know more or less what he is talking about.

The Test match, however, was going to be the least of my worries that week, for this was the week I was to co-host Channel 10’s
Good Morning Australia
breakfast television show with resident anchorman Gordon Elliot, as the regular hostess, Kerri-Anne Kennerley, was away on holiday in Europe. The whole idea had originally seemed like quite a wheeze.

Doing breakfast TV is a killer. I had never done anything like this before in my life, and in retrospect should have insisted on a minimum of a couple of hours’ training before going national. After a week’s experience I am sure that looking at camera X, reading autocue Y and doing interview Z becomes a piece of cake. At any rate it cannot be more difficult than trying to unravel the linguistic macramé of a President Mitterrand when he is trying to obfuscate, the sort of hoop through which we conference interpreters are regularly obliged to jump.

The first problem to contend with is getting up in the morning at about 4.30 am. Bad enough though this may be when living in a normal household configuration, with an upstairs, a downstairs, rooms to eat in, rooms to work in, and rooms to watch the television in, it becomes virtually impossible if you happen to be sharing a hotel bedroom with the most selfish man in the world.

The Sebel was full, thanks to the Elton John travelling circus, and the Lionel ‘dancing on the ceiling’ Richie entourage, otherwise I should most certainly have moved into another room to get some sleep at night. As it was, Phil insisted on watching those educationally subnormal productions they broadcast until midnight here on hotel television, and then reading until about 3 am for good measure. When I left at 4.30 am, heady with lack of sleep, I would tiptoe around in the dark, clothes all neatly laid out beforehand, lest I should wake him. And to cap it all, Phil, who normally watches breakfast TV from its inception at 7 am, never bothered to watch it even once that entire week. Do you wonder I laugh when I hear accusations of failing to be a supportive wife? The only thing that ten years of marriage has taught me is that all this being supportive nonsense works in one direction only.

Gordon Elliot is a very large, very gifted, very talented man with a commensurately large ego. I like him a lot. It is rare to find genuinely funny people. He has hosted the show for almost six years now, and is moving on in two weeks’ time to greater, more glorious things than breakfast TV. Anyone’s private and social life must be seriously curtailed when a 4.30 am start is mandatory, and he openly admits that he is leaving with few regrets.

The first morning we chatted about the larceny perpetrated in England’s dressing room at the Sydney Cricket Ground, where, amongst other things, Ian Botham’s custom-built three-pound bats had been liberated. Fortunately bat-maker and Worcestershire County Cricket Club Committee member, Duncan Fearnley, was on hand, both to organise Botham’s new county contract, and to replenish the
lacunae
in the bat situation.

‘It’s a special bat, with a three-black-condom grip handle,’ Duncan explained to me one evening. I repeated this knowledgeably to Gordon the next morning.

‘The sort teams use in Barbados, I assume,’ he rejoined, blue eyes twinkling behind steel-framed spectacles. He never missed a trick.

I have never fully understood who watches breakfast television. Certainly I only ever watch it when closeted in a hotel room, where the range of the radio is restricted to some dreadful demi-classical muzak and the inanities of the local radio station. Surely if people are on their way to work, they do not have time to sit and watch the box? And if they are not on their way to work, why bother to get up at 7 am to watch two hours of trivial tales and enforcedly jovial chat? I, of course, am perfectly at liberty to think what I like. The statistics show that an estimated five million people get up every morning, switch on the telly, and watch
Good Morning Australia.
In a country as sparsely populated as Australia, that is one helluva lot of people.

Dear Matthew Engel rang up surreptitiously to say ‘well done’ after the first programme. I say surreptitiously, because the received wisdom is that no cricket correspondent worth his media medal should see the light of day before 10 am. When England captain Mike Gatting overslept for the State game against Victoria the tabloid furore knew no bounds, but there were in fact no more than half a dozen journalists in the press box who had actually arrived at the ground in time to eyewitness his non-arrival. The degree of outrage expressed, however, was in general terms inversely proportional to the track record of punctuality demonstrated by any named correspondent. Oh, what a comatosely unsensational tour this has been! Last year in the West Indies, the press seemed almost pleasantly surprised when eleven Englishmen bothered to pitch up for the Test matches, let alone other matches, and the attendance level at ‘optional nets’ became synonymous with absolute laissez-faire.

Anyway, Engel had been awake and watching. We both had a quiet giggle. The unknown Peter Taylor, who two days prior was deemed to have been the unknowing victim of selectorial homonomoeia, was by now a national hero, having picked up six wickets in an uncompromisingly mediocre batting performance from the English. He had been enjoined to chat to me on the programme, but when the producer rang in the morning he slammed the phone down. The pressures of instant stardom were apparently so great that he had even felt the need to go walkabout. Talk about overnight success! He does seem a very pleasant sort of fellow, though, and I do hope he does not end up, as so many do, just another three-day wonder.

Fortunately we managed to catch Australian wicketkeeper, Tim Zoehrer, instead, he of the limerick interchange with Phil. I heard through the grapevine that the producer had tried about four of the Aussies, and they had all refused. The general feeling was that I would give them a very rough time, and that this was a pain they could do without. They need not have worried. I am conscious of Australian cricketers’ proclivities for bursting into tears, and would not have chanced so distressing a performance so early in the morning. Besides, at 7 am, I am a fairly harmless sort of creature, and it would certainly never have occurred to me, for example, to ask them whether they perceived themselves as a bunch of wimps for calling off their 1988 planned tour of the West Indies. At all events, interfacing with the West Indies and with La Edmonds appeared to rate equally highly on Australian cricketers’ list of traumas to be avoided.

I believe, from Phil, that Tim was quite astounded that I could be so nice. Hell! Why on earth should I haul some poor blighter over the coals when he has been good enough to get out of bed to fill a colleague’s spot? He made a few deprecating comments about Phil’s ability to spin the ball, and we laughed about the limerick saga, a minor incident which the press, even serious broadsheets such as the
Melbourne Age
, are trying to turn into a miniseries; all in all it was fairly tame stuff.

‘Yes, tame,’ said old Engel. ‘Most of the stories and interviews are so tame and trivial. And the stories are so trite.’

Engel, as usual, was incontrovertibly right. Stories on seals being weighed in after Christmas, interviews which give folk three minutes to explain their life’s work, or to expound on extremely complicated issues, cross-chat with half-witted actresses who are semi-speechless without a script – this is the stuff of which breakfast TV is made.

There were a few real gems that week, however, as for example an interview with the brilliant Spanish flamenco virtuoso Paco Peña, whom I have adulated since I first heard him in a one-man concert in Cambridge. But basically Engel was right. The good folk of Australia do not want to be hit with anything other than the anodyne at that time of the day.