Cricket XXXX Cricket (26 page)

An invitation to address the National Press Club is, under any circumstance, an honour and a privilege, but for a Pommie woman to be asked to speak to this eminent forum during its Australia Day celebratory luncheon it is all the more so. It is daunting to see the photographs of immediate predecessors on the wall: outstanding politicians such as Margaret Thatcher, Rajiv Gandhi, Bob Hawke and Sir Les Patterson; international diplomats, captains of industry and stars of stage and screen; famous authors and top-notch journalists. What on earth was I doing here?

The National Press Club in Canberra, as you would imagine, is comprised of members of the press corps, but visiting diplomats and local luminaries are also allowed to join. Only practising journalists, however, are allowed to exercise voting rights and to put questions to speakers. These are rules apparently designed to guarantee that the essentially press-dominated hallmark of the Club is maintained since in some State press club the journalistic flavour has been over-diluted by extraneous elements gaining equal rights and taking over. No one is going to let that happen here.

Making your own vaguely amusing and perfectly fatuous speech is one thing. Fielding forty-five minutes of questions from the Canberra press corps is quite another. On winding up my address, it was reassuring to be advised to remain good-humoured if a certain financial correspondent were to ask me an awkward question. This chap apparently boasts a healthy track record for pointedly rude questions to most speakers, or, at least, so I was warned. Sure enough, after the usual guff about life as a cricket widow, said journo stood up and asked a fairly detailed question about the EEC’s trading patterns, Monetary Compensatory Amounts, the Common Agricultural Policy and the European Communities’ budget.

There has never been a shortage of topics I can bore people to death with, but these are some of my favourite ‘goodies’. I have, after all, been involved with European Institutions since the United Kingdom acceded to the European Communities in 1973. It would appear I passed the litmus test. The putatively awkward financial correspondent even congratulated me on the answer – it was the only way anyone could think of to shut me up. He was the first incidentally to buy a copy of
Another Bloody Tour.

From then on it was, as the saying goes, plain sailing. To this day I feel, however, that if I had fluffed, there could have been carnage. I was, after all, dealing with the press, not the
a priori
perfectly well-disposed contingent which constituted the rest of the 350-strong audience. Someone asked for an interpreting anecdote. I ended up doing impersonations of Margaret Thatcher and President Mitterrand. Anything anti-French goes down very well here at the moment. The French Government, piqued in the United Nations over Australia’s attitude to their neocolonialism in New Caledonia, had recently kicked the Aussie’s most senior representative off the island and there is currently even a retaliatory movement afoot to boycott French produce: no more Charles Jourdan shoes, no more Christian Dior clothes, no more French wine! They’ll certainly feel the pinch! The Aussies, that is.

I returned to the now cricketer-free zone at our Bondi Junction apartments quite exhausted. It had been a long day. Lindsay Lamb, who is staying here with me for a few days before hitting the sunshine on the east coast, arrived half an hour later. It was definitely time for a well-earned flute of something. We talked until late, our checking-up husbands interfering periodically from Adelaide to ascertain whether we were having a night on the tiles. Lindsay was incensed about a piece in one of the papers suggesting that Lamby had obstructed Reid during his mammoth final over slog. We compared the column inches devoted to the unsuccessful Aussie cricket team and the column yards expended in high encomium on the wonderfully improved Aussie tennis player, Pat Cash. Even Hana Mandlikova has now been taken to the national bosom since she applied for Australian citizenship.

‘These Aussies are not good losers,’ said Mrs Lamb.

‘These Aussies are a bunch of wimps,’ hyperbolised Mrs Edmonds.

‘Talk about Lamby cheating,’ added Mrs L.

‘Talk about cancelling their Windies tour,’ rejoined Mrs E.

The hands of the clock moved forward. The meniscus of the bottle of whatever it was dropped.

The opinions got progressively more bawdy. It was good to be out of the circus for a while.

When Lindsay left early, two days later, I missed her. It is comforting to know that you are not the only outrageous cricketing wife in the world, and despite well-proclaimed intentions of remaining in Sydney to write, her departure made me feel unconscionably depressed. It was therefore only 8.30 am by the time I reached Palm Beach, and took up supine station in Hopkinsons’ hammock. The boy was doing the odd mega-yen deal on the blower to Tokyo. Nick, the future brother-in-law, was making chilli con carne for dinner. I looked at the cloud formation in the sky, the bright blue and black butterflies flutteringly fragile in the hydrangeas, the playful possum pottering in the pine trees, the cheeky kookaburras chortling merrily in concert, the surf thrashing with break-neck force on to the beach below. It was then with a sudden flash of incandescent lucidity that the thought crossed my mind: CRICKET XXXX CRICKET!

Try as I might to escape from its all-encompassing tendrils, however, what do I then behold in my half-hearted efforts to read the
Weekend Australian
but that cricket supremo Jack Bailey, Secretary of the MCC, has returned from Australia after a nice cricket-watching hiatus in an English winter, and handed in his resignation. Up at Palm Beach, there was much corporate distress amongst the Pimms. Only two weeks prior, at a Double Bay dinner party, our brilliant physiotherapist hostess, Sarah, and our top trial-lawyer host, Russell, had sensibly but unnecessarily gone to great pains to place Jack and me at separate ends of a very long table. Without the restraining influence of celebrated peacemaker Phil, it was generally felt that no one from Lord’s would feel particularly comfortable within my immediate vicinity.

It was unfortunate, however, that they should instead have seated Mark Hopkinson in relatively close proximity to our now erstwhile MCC secretary. Mark, an Oxford man and a northerner,

has that wicked way with one-liners which so constitutes my idea of humour: a trifle sardonic, possibly, and often very pointed, yet never gratuitously malevolent. More and more he reminds me, as I have already said, of my brother Brendan, whose radical epistles to Jamaica’s
The Gleaner
berating the apparent indifference of the Seaga administration, will probably earn him a machete in the back of the head before he returns to the more tranquil climes of the Moorfields Eye Hospital in London later this year.

Seated on the other side of Jack was a friend of ours, Jane Adams, who deals with syndications for News Corporation Ltd, Rupert Murdoch’s stable of newspapers here in Australia. From the bottom of the table, I could see a fairly animated conversation going on at the top. Wavy blond-haired head and wide blue eyes focused amiably on Jack, with all the innocent naiveté of a Botticelli angel, Hopkinson was asking what an MCC secretary actually did for a living. Did he, for example, send out receipts for the subscriptions, and take the gate money? Jack, by all accounts, was already finding some difficulty in fielding such questions, when Jane waded in, wondering whether being secretary of the MCC was a full-time occupation, or whether it merely involved selling the odd egg-and-bacon tie on high days and holidays?

What on earth have they done between the pair of them? Has their genuine, if ingenuous interest precipitated an existential, nay nihilistic round of tortured soul-searching in poor Jack’s red and yellow striped MCC bosom? Who will ever know . . .?

_______________

*
GMA is
Good Morning Australia
.

^†
It was interesting that when Ned Sherrin read the piece out on BBC Radio Four’s Saturday morning
Loose Ends
broadcast, there was not a single hint of a complaint.

*
Arnotts: ginger-nut biscuit makers.

It was a wrench indeed to tear myself away from the idyll of Sydney, but who could resist an invitation to the swansong of the America’s Cup?

Along with the majority of Australians, I too was disappointed when the people’s hero Alan Bond, the man who brought the America’s Cup to Australia, was deprived of the right to defend it by Kevin Parry’s Taskforce syndicate and the
Kookaburras.
In the challengers’ final, despite some magnificent sailing in the preliminary rounds, the Kiwis had been decisively beaten by Dennis Conner, and most people had wanted to see a re-run of Newport – Conner’s crew versus the Bondy boys. It was not to be, however, and already the final seemed a trifle second best.

Both the Kiwis and the Bond syndicates had thrown the weight of their resources behind the
Kookaburras
, Bondy even handing over the Australia crew’s totemic Boxing Kangaroo pennant to the cause, and they were thanked profusely by their syndicate director, Ken Court. Ken, of course, may well know plenty about twelve-metre racing, but his sense of history was ominously off-course.

‘When the Anzacs get together and put up a fight,’ he said in a press statement, ‘they usually win.’

Obviously no one had told him about Gallipoli. Obviously no one had told him about Big Bad Dennis.

It is difficult not to admire the irrepressible Bondy’s ability to bounce back in the face of adversity. The day
Australia IV
lost the defence, he announced a multibillion dollar takeover of Kerry Packer’s Channel 9 media empire.

Lurking nebulously somewhere, there seemed to be a degree of bittersweet historical irony about the business. Kerry’s father, Sir Frank, had been the first Australian to mount a challenge for the America’s Cup and Bond had been the first Australian (albeit adoptive) to win it.

The portents for another Australian victory, however, were not good. For a start, Bob Hawke was out of the country on a Middle Eastern tour. Had there been the merest sniff of an Aussie victory in the air, he would have doubtless been in Freo to greet it. So used are voters here to the Prime Minister’s ubiquity at sporting successes, that Allan Border apparently refused to believe his much maligned team had won the final Test until Bob walked into the dressing room.

On yet another continent, the other great PR politician, President Reagan, had woken up from his post-Irangate amnesia in time to wager his white cowboy hat on
Stars and Stripes
regaining the Cup for America. Members of the President’s immediate entourage wondered what he would talk through should he be deprived of it, but with Conner 3–0 up in a best-of-seven final, the chances of losing his normal conduit of communication seemed negligible. Ever game, Bob Hawke matched the bet with an Akubra on the
Kookaburras
, although wags were suggesting that Bond had added a codicil to the deal: if Parry’s syndicate were to lose the Cup after all Bondy’s Herculean efforts to win it in the first place, the bush-hat, it was mooted, would come attached to the head of the
Kooka III
skipper, Iain Murray . . .

I arrived at Perth airport to be met by a uniformed chauffeur in a white stretch limo, just the sort of vehicle American presidents get assassinated in. He whisked me off to the Esplanade Hotel in Fremantle, where it was all happening. I had always thought cricketers attracted a fair quota of female groupies, but this was an entirely different league of (as crew members refer to them so affectionately when they have served their useful purpose) ‘star fuckers’.

Groupie-ism would seem to be an almost exclusively female preserve. Hordes of chunky young men, for example, do not tend to cluster around female tennis players; more likely, even there, to find hordes of chunky young women. But that’s a different story. No; is it perhaps that
so
many women, for
so
many years have been
so
used to gaining their names, their identities, their very social significance from the men they happen to be connected with that has produced this phenomenon? The sentiment of vicarious importance is so far deep-rooted, that some women still patently feel that being bedded for the night by someone famous confers a degree of kudos.

For our sins, we had to suffer one such female over dinner in Perth last time we were here, basically because there are no depths to some, otherwise quite acceptable guys’ execrable taste. She claimed to be Franco-Swiss, but was about as Franco-Swiss as Kaiser Bill’s batman. Not that there is anything wrong with being German, my word no. Not, that is, unless you are the sort of German who thinks it is better to be Franco-Swiss. Her multifarious claims to all sorts seemed tenuous to say the least, and it was difficult not to gain the impression that she was training for the decathlon in screwing. She had started on a few relatively low-profile long-distance runners, moved swiftly on to the more glitzy tribe of Formula One racing drivers, passed quickly through a couple of cricketers, and was now heavily into the twelve-metre men. Not bad, for a fortnight in Australia.

I remember talking to Jilly Cooper about this very phenomenon at a book launch last year, and she put her finger on the essence of it: again, the inequality of the sexes. The more successful or famous a man is, the more women he has to choose from, and the more fatuous females he has falling at his feet. The more successful or famous a woman is, the more isolated she becomes from men wary of her. That night at the Esplanade in Freo, there were wall-to-wall just such fatuous females, and all willing and eager.

Back at the World Series Cup, England seemed to be suffering from a mid-series crisis. An inspired piece of advice from Peter Lush had resulted in Botham opening the batting, a gamble which was paying off handsomely, and Bruce French, recalled to the team on Jack Richards’ injury, was keeping wicket brilliantly. The middle-order batting, however, always an element of fragility in the side, was looking as stable as the Mexican economy. For a perilous while, the team seemed to have lost the will to win, and England’s place in the final looked far from certain.