Cricket XXXX Cricket (6 page)

My second visit was as happy as the first one was miserable. I had been recruited as an interpreter to accompany the President of the European Parliament, Madame Simone Veil, and an inter-parliamentary delegation on a two-week whistle-stop tour throughout the length and breadth of New Zealand and Australia. In New Zealand we were accorded grade-A diplomatic status. The New Zealanders, after all, were keen to ensure that they could continue to export at least some radically reduced quotas of lamb and dairy produce to their traditional markets in the United Kingdom. Since accession to the European Communities in 1973, however, Britain had been under constant pressure from her European partners to sever former Commonwealth trading links, and to respect that fundamental tenet of Community Preference. Community Preference is one of the basic principles on which Europe’s much-criticised Common Agricultural Policy is based. In a nutshell what it means for countries such as Great Britain is this: forget the fact that you have traded with Commonwealth countries for hundreds of years, and that they have geared their entire economies to your domestic market’s likes and dislikes. Forget the fact that one of the immutable beliefs of the French and the Germans is that farmers’ incomes (unlike the incomes in any other economic category) shall be guaranteed, even when said farmers produce mountains of foods and lakes of liquids that nobody wants, and that therefore their produce is often more expensive than stuff that has been shipped from the other end of the world. Forget all these things, and whatever the knock-down price on world markets,
always buy European.

Many British politicians, even pro-marketeers, still find these rules rather difficult to stomach. The problem is, however, as the Continentals never cease to remind us, that if you join a club, then you play by the rules. The British are used to the concept of clubs of course, and to public school ideals of playing by rules. Unfortunately for us, however, most of the Europeans have developed more advanced ideas on gamesmanship.

Well, before this cricket tour diary starts sounding like a thesis on the Treaty of Rome, I better get on with the story. The European delegation was the usual carefully ‘de Honte’-balanced mixture of nationalities and political hues. There was a Dutch socialist ornithological environmentalist, pinky-green, I suppose, in the political colour spectrum. He spent a lot of time staring hopefully through binoculars, looking for a lesser-spotted kookaburra, or some such unlikely creature. There was an Italian lady communist, inevitably and quite rightly concerned about equal employment opportunities for women, and Aboriginal land rights. There was an Italian energy expert from the Christian Democratic group (a group which in Italy is neither Christian nor particularly democratic), who was concerned about uranium mining. There was a bright young German concerned about more or less everything under the sun, and a dour old Luxembourger concerned about very little other than accounting creatively for his copious expenses. There was an extremely hard-working woman from the British Labour group, a pro-marketeer (a species even rarer than the lesser spotted kookaburra, or a Christian and democratic Christian Democrat), and the only one who knew much about sheep-meat and lamb, the entire
raison d’être
for this peripatetic League of Nations jaunt. There was the President of the European Parliament, French Liberal Simone Veil, once tipped as a possible candidate for the first woman Prime Minister of France, a remarkable character who had suffered the trauma of a Jewish adolescence spent in a Nazi concentration camp, and who still bore the mark of her prisoner’s registration number etched indelibly on her arm. And then, of course, there was an English lord, who seemed to know little about anything, but who pontificated with great authority, in an impressive golf-balls-in-the-gob public school accent on virtually everything. But for the partridge in the pear tree, the twelve days of Christmas had nothing on us.

The status accorded to the delegation in Australia was no more than B-minus. Whilst the New Zealanders were desperate to woo the Europeans, the Australians were far more aggressive in their trading tactics. ‘If you don’t buy our agricultural produce,’ came the message when we arrived in Canberra, ‘then you won’t be getting our uranium.’

The Prime Minister of the day could not be located to address us, so his deputy was despatched to do the necessary. He did not appear to be excessively conversant with who all these Europeans were. That was fair enough. They certainly had not the foggiest who he was either.

‘Well,’ he rounded off with jovial relief, as soon as it was decent to extricate himself from these multilingual oddballs who had come 12,000 miles to see someone who was out, ‘well, I’ll see you again soon – at the GATT talks’ (nothing to do with England’s Captain) ‘in Geneva’.

The European Parliament does not participate in GATT talks, and neither do its members (apart from visits to the odd numbered bank account) ever go anywhere near Geneva.

This exhausting two-week Australasian mission ended in Perth, in the Sheraton-Perth Hotel, to be exact, the very pub we are staying in for the state match against Western Australia. I felt a pang of nostalgia as I walked into the lobby, and thought of my Dutch interpreter colleague, Tineke, and her Paris-based sister, Jeanette, who had suffered that punishing schedule in giddy sorority with me. Other members of the delegation had flown home immediately; we on the contrary elected to stay. After a few days’ rest and recuperation in Perth, we would soak up the odd ray on the paradise island of Bali before returning to the miseries of a north European winter.

We did all the things tourists are supposed to do. We bought opals, which turned out to be twice as expensive as analogous stones readily available at places like Asprey’s. We took a boat trip down the river, and we shopped in a rather naff little parade, London Court, where developers have gone to great pains to be wrong in every historical detail. The most glaring anachronism is a replica of Big Ben, carefully juxtaposed with fake black-and-white cement ‘shoppes’ cavorting as Tudor timber structures. It ranks fairly high on the Richter scale of execrable taste, but, deprived as we had been of consumer opportunities, we enjoyed it nevertheless.

Jeanette, at that time, was in her Céline phase. Every season she decides on a designer, and the entire collection is then duly purchased. This trip she had Céline everything, from her sewing-kit to her sunglasses, clothes, shoes, luggage, scarves, accessories, jewellery, everything. She was a symphony in Céline, each item carefully coordinated, matched, toned and selected . . .
très quinzième.

We decided to have dinner at the hotel. It was Saturday night, and patently this Saturday night was the night for the Australian Rules team of some province or other to take their respective sheilas out for a do. Jeanette watched, sartorially startled, as some of the definitely non-couture creations wafted past her in the lobby bar . . . the sort of incandescent green crimplenes and electric fuchsia Treviras still much in evidence four years later at the Melbourne Cup.

‘Mon Dieu!’ she exclaimed finally, a Parisian resident truly rattled by this insouciant Aussie mix ’n’ match, by this generalised
laissez-aller vestimentaire.

‘]e sais que pas tout le monde peut s’habiller chez Céline, mais entre ça, et ce que je vois la, ma fille, il y a un monde . . . UN MONDE.’ (I know we can’t all dress at Céline, but between Céline and THAT – a world of difference, my dear, a world.)

Despite her initial shock at some of the more casual aspects of Australian life, however, Jeanette fell deeply in love with the place, and comes back to Australia every year on an annual pilgrimage from Paris. Far more sympathetic perhaps, the laid-back Aussies, than the uptight French.

Such were the thoughts of fun times shared, and dear friends sorely missed, as I descended on the Sheraton-Perth Hotel. The team arrived a few hours later, having won the rain-affected fixture at Kalgoorlie. A sepia-tinted turn-of-the-century photograph of the Kalgoorlie cricket team shows the umpire carrying a shotgun, an eloquent indication, perhaps, of the type of behaviour prevalent on the field in those days. Civilisation, by all accounts, has taken a tighter grip on the place now, and the town council is even trying to clean up the notorious image of the place as a gold-mining town studded with tin-shack whorehouses. Business is apparently still thriving in both fields of activity, and it takes the ladies of the night no more than a year to eighteen months to earn enough loot to up and off on the compulsory overseas tour. The council has currently taken to bulldozing down these rather tacky brothels, though graciously they do forewarn the inmates and their clients. Who knows, otherwise, how many other eminent persons might be inadvertently caught with their pants down? It does seem a shame though that such a celebrated tourist attraction should be so summarily flattened . . . sort of thing the old Greater London Council (God rest its soul) would slap a preservation order on . . . probably even give a grant to as well . . .

Phil had been twelfth-man for the match, and so had taken the opportunity to visit a gold mine. Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? In fairness, he did bring me back a gold nugget for the much-vaunted wedding anniversary. Nothing to get hysterical about, girls, it was hardly a boulder, but I suppose I can have it made up into something suitably gaudy and crass if we stop off in Hong Kong on our way back. In fact, I am given to believe that Phil actually has some small interest in the opencast mine he visited. When I say small, it is probably nugatory, but who cares if I have got the one nugget? Anyway, be the interest large or small, I always wanted a husband who owns a gold mine.

Perth, at the moment, is vibrant, seething with excitement over the America’s Cup, which is being bitterly contested up the coast in Fremantle. Even those of you who know little of this somewhat esoteric, rich man’s sport of twelve-metre yacht racing will nevertheless recall the tremendous national jubilation surrounding Australia’s victory over the Americans at Newport in 1983. Self-made Pom-done-good-Perth-multimillionaire Alan Bond and the crew of
Australia II
did the impossible in capturing the Auld Mug (as the priceless Garrard’s trophy is affectionately called), from the United States, after the Americans’ 132 years’ dominance in the competition. The Bond syndicate employed genius Ben Lexcen to design the boat, with its radical winged keel, and no expense was spared on sailmakers, sports psychologists and technical back-up staff in an effort to guarantee success over the man many people still believe to be the best twelve-metre sailor in the world, maestro skipper Dennis Conner, and his ‘Red Boat’,
Liberty.

The story of the commitment, the heartache, the joys and the pains of that epic victory are well documented in the controversial book
Born to Win
, written by, or at least ghost-written for, the
Australia II
skipper John Bertrand. Bertrand’s version of events is not entirely accepted by all parties concerned, and is, quite forgivably, a fairly free exercise in self-promotion. It is nevertheless an intriguing insight even for non-aficionados like myself, and the passages on sports psychology make quite revealing reading. It may come as a shock for example, that Australians, for all their ostentatiously brash, macho and assertive profile, apparently feel themselves deep-down to be second-best. The ‘tall poppy’ syndrome predominates in the Australian consciousness – a philosophy which advises: don’t be a tall poppy, don’t be head and shoulders above the rest; don’t strive for excellence; accept the position as second best; remember that the tall poppies are usually the ones that get their heads blown off. On reflection the Australians are certainly far from being alone in granting this attitude such widespread currency.

Bertrand explains how years of defeat had inured the Australians into
feeling
, and therefore into
being
, inferior to the Americans. From the beginning of the 1983 series, even though the American defender,
Liberty
, was in most conditions nowhere near as fast as
Australia II
, the Australian crew nevertheless had to overcome the psychological disadvantage of
expecting
to be beaten by the Yanks. How Bertrand melded his crew into a galvanised – if not invincible, then at least never-say-die – fighting force is perhaps a tract to which losing cricket captains Gatting and Border might usefully devote a few hours’ bedtime reading. The fundamental message of the biography is that many people often have to learn to believe in the idea of winning.

The cricket. It does crop up, a tedious leitmotif in my life, like period pains, hangovers, tax returns and publishing deadlines. But who on earth can be bothered, however, to watch England, in their present state of casual incompetence, playing woeful cricket against a team of virtual teenagers at the WACA (Western Australian Cricket Association), when ten minutes away in Freo (as in Freemantle) the town is knee-deep in multimillionaires? Twelve-metre racing, it is true, is generally perceived as a rich man’s sport, but that is not to say that all members of the respective crews are themselves loaded. On the contrary, many yachtsmen will find themselves seriously out of pocket by the end of this Cup series. Although the syndicates either challenging for, or defending the Auld Mug are positively awash with sponsors’ spondulicks, many of the men subjected to the back-breaking effort of sailing the boats are Olympic yachtsmen, and at pains to maintain their amateur status. Indeed Bertrand even maintains that the day he won the America’s Cup, he was stony broke. He resigned immediately, knowing full well that having reached his personal pinnacle of sporting achievement, there was only one inexorable way to go. He then hired himself a good promotions agent, and is currently commentating on the series for Channel 9 television.

On the free day, Phil and I went off to Freo to visit the British challenger,
White Crusader.
Why on earth the cricket team persists in calling these days ‘free’ is a mystery to me. The concept of a free day would seem to posit an element of work, commitment, sweat and toil on other de facto non-free days. Unfortunately, England’s performances to date, particularly against Queensland and Western Australia, have been characterised by nothing but the very opposite. There are three minor niggles with the current England touring side, wrote Martin Johnson of
The Independent
newspaper.