Cricket XXXX Cricket (7 page)

‘They can’t bat, they can’t bowl and they can’t field.’ It is one of those brilliantly uncompromising one-liners he may have to learn to live with, especially if the tides of cricketing fortune turn. For the sake of historical accuracy, however, it must be admitted that the day Martin penned that obituary, it was all absolutely and incontrovertibly true. Most worrying in the England camp is the continuing lack of form demonstrated by David Gower. In the match against Perth he was dismissed twice without managing to trouble the scoreboard. Ever-sympathetic to a man in trauma, the team’s in-house sports psychologists have nicknamed the hapless former captain ‘Run-Glut’.

Fremantle is a charming little town, some thirty minutes away from Perth on the freeway. It has certainly become a hive of cosmopolitan activity since the thirteen challenging syndicates from six different nations arrived. Apart from the Australian defenders of the Cup, there are challengers from the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, France and Italy, and each has left its nationalistic imprint on the place. Several syndicates, for example, have constituted their own clubs. The Royal Thames Yacht Club, that is to say, the 1987 British challenger for the America’s Cup, has organised for itself and privileged guests a Crusade Club (after the syndicate’s yachts
Crusader 1
and
II).
It is a delightfully, terribly, terribly, quintessentially English gentlemen’s club, more in place in Pall Mall, London, than Fremantle, Western Australia. Two large, varnished oak doors, a highly polished brass plate discreetly proclaiming its identity and an illuminated bell are its only concessions to ostentation in a row of otherwise nondescript terraced houses. Inside, you could well be on British soil. There is a royal-blue fitted carpet, with an anchor motif, and an abundance of brass and oak. Blazers and cravats seem very much to be the order of the day, although depressed sailors drowning their day’s maritime sorrows (on the night we were there it happened to be the badly beaten South Australia syndicate), are permitted less formal attire.

Not all syndicates have set up private clubs, although the ever flash and extrovert Italians lead the field. The Costa Smeralda Yacht Club, Consorzio Azzurra, whose major sponsors include Giovanni Agnelli (he of Fiat fame) and His Highness the Aga Khan, are certainly not to be outdone. The Aga Khan, finding nowhere sufficiently be-Michelin-starred in Fremantle to accommodate his sophisticated billionaire tastes, created his own restaurant, Le Maschere, where the food is as overpriced as it is proportionately underwhelming. He has also renovated, in birthday cake icing pinks and whites, a hotel which belongs to his celebrated CIGA chain of expensive watering holes.

There is no shortage of Italians in Australia – indeed after Poms and Greeks they form the largest expatriate population. However, the good burghers of Freo have not taken quite as warmly to the Costa Smeralda super-suave sophisticates as they have to the other Italian contingent, the Italia syndicate. This syndicate is heavily sponsored by Gucci heir, Maurizio Gucci, and is beloved by all for being so totally, utterly and uncompromisingly Italian. During the launch of the syndicate’s newest, boat,
Italia II
, in La Spezia, for instance, a crane dropped on the multimillion-lira creation and irretrievably sank it. Their spokesman, phlegmatic for anyone under the circumstances, but particularly so for an Italian, a race which as all we Anglo-Saxons know is readily given to histrionics and hyperbolics at the merest drop of a
cappello
, commented that the accident had obviously delayed the yacht’s development. Sadly, it was never salvaged.

A few weeks later, on a lay day, a few of the crew, dressed up to the nines in all their Gucci-sponsored designer gear, went out sightseeing in their brand new Alfa Romeo sports car. Hurtling around a blind corner, very much
all’italiano
, they ran straight into a huge kangaroo. Leaping out of their somewhat dented vehicle, resplendent in the afternoon sun in their red, white and green yachting uniforms, they were initially horrified at having killed Australia’s greatest symbol. But tourists after all are tourists, and Italians after all are Italians, and so they hoisted up the old roo and took a few photographs, posing beside him. One of the culprits even went so far as to dress the demised marsupial in his Via-Condotti-eat-your-heart-out designer jacket. Suddenly, however, the kangaroo, who had only been stunned, came to his senses and hopped off back into the bush, taking with him the Gucci coat, and the driver’s licence, credit cards, cheque book, wallet and car keys. The poor Italians had to hitch a lift back into Freo, trying to explain their hilarious tale in broken English to an incredulous local.

The highly gregarious Italia syndicate has a club as well. It is called Casa Italia, all white, red, green and jolly, and looks like nothing so much as a huge spaghetti parlour. They also have a shop, where pretty girls unable to charm one off the more susceptible crew members, may buy their own Gucci T-shirts, sweaters and down-lined vests. In fact, for a price the entire range is available right down to the Gucci-designer underpants!

We went to visit the British challenge on not, perhaps, the most propitious of days.
White Crusader’s
mast had been badly bent, and the race had inevitably been lost. Shore manager Andrew ‘Spud’ Spedding, whom Phil and I have known over some four years, was nevertheless in good spirits and generally pleased with the way things were shaping up. We had met Spud, along with mutual friends, in a pub in Devon during the 1983 America’s Cup in Newport. He had just parted company, not entirely amicably, with Peter de Savary, the leading sponsorship light in that particular failed British effort. Current
White Crusader
skipper, Harold Cudmore, had also resigned, unable to take any more of de Savary’s unsavoury philosophy of creative tension, i.e. not telling people what they were doing the next day, or indeed whether or not they even had a job, in perverse efforts to keep them on their toes. This British challenge has certainly rid itself of individual and dominant patriarchs, a common enough feature in yacht racing, and is managing itself as a listed company along Business Expansion Scheme lines.

Yes, indeed, times have certainly changed since the days of Sir Thomas Lipton, that Grand Old Man of America’s Cup challengers. Sir Thomas was denied membership of Britain’s Royal Yacht Squadron until he was virtually dead, because he was ‘in trade’, a cardinal sin for those ever-so-amateur chaps running things in Cowes in the 1920s and 1930s. Although ‘Sir Tea’, as he was affectionately known, never directly used any one of his five Cup challengers to promote his product directly (they were all named ‘Shamrock’ . . . Heaven knows what riot the marketing boys would have today, with combined concepts of ‘Cup and Tea’ to work on), it was nevertheless obvious that his involvement in these competitions did his corporate profits no harm whatsoever.

It is therefore more than passingly ironic that it is none other than the British themselves, those watchdogs of the ‘play up, play up, and play the game’ Corinthian ethic, who have used their best endeavours to allow the trade in on the twelve-metre act and all that that signifies in terms of creeping commercialism. Initiatives have been implemented to do away with rule twenty-six of the Cup, the last barrier to overt sponsorship/public relations packages. The British challenge, relatively impecunious compared to many of the syndicates in Freo, was obliged to accept over a million pounds from the manufacturers of White Horse Whisky for changing their boat’s name from
Crusader
to
White Crusader.
Nothing too offensive, really, and certainly not half as provocative as the
Société des Régates Rochelaises
, whose challenge is heavily sponsored by a French photographic company, KIS France. They have named their boat
French Kiss
, and during press conferences their skipper, Marc Pajot, talks in delightful
double entendre
Inspector Clouseau-like English about improving our
French Kiss
techniques.

The British, of course, do not want anything even half so vaguely vulgar and nasty. Perhaps a nice, inoffensive, generic word such as ‘White’ incorporated into the boat’s name, discreet sponsors’ logos on the spinnakers, but nothing in any way crass or flashy on the mainsails or headsails. It remains to be seen whether sponsors, whose financial commitments run into millions of pounds, will be satisfied with that. At all events, a life-sized white horse adorns the British challenger’s yard, and the gaily painted sheds pay ample tribute to another red, white and blue sponsor, British Airways.

It is difficult to know what, besides the Peter de Savarys of life, could ruffle Spud Spedding. The bent mast had cost
White Crusader
her hard-earned third position in the challenger series, but slots in the table tend to change on a daily basis, and Spud, for one, was not going to spend the rest of the day crying over a spilt mainsail. As we waited for the disabled yacht to be towed in, he regaled us with even more stories about the wild and wonderful Italia syndicate.

‘They are a delight to sail against,’ exuded Spud. ‘They never want to do too much work on deck in case they mess up their natty uniforms. And we know when they’re about to tack. They all take one last, final drag, and throw their cigarettes overboard.’

Despite funds of around five million pounds to draw on, the Royal Thames Yacht Club’s
White Crusader
and her entourage are still very poor relations compared to the New York Yacht Club and
America II
, the Royal Perth Yacht Club with the affluent Bond and Kookaburra syndicates, and the astoundingly successful Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron with the brilliant young skipper Chris Dickson and her Kiwis
KZ-3, KZ-5, KZ-7.
Where other crews might rest after sailing, the
White Crusader
team is often obliged to compensate for the relative paucity of back-up staff by helping out on shore afterwards, hauling sails and swabbing down decks. Sailing twelve-metre yachts is a round-the-clock operation, and I saw Phil blanch visibly as he heard of the British crew’s normal daily schedule: up at six; breakfast; weight training; jogging; heave the heavy sails on board; sail for three, four or five hours, often in that monstrously strong, yet for landlubbers wonderfully refreshing wind the locals call the Fremantle Doctor; haul the far heavier wet sails off the yacht; lay them out to dry; scrub down the deck and start doing odd jobs in the yard: perhaps a run; dinner; collapse. And all this, in the case of many of the crew, for nothing more than their board and keep, and the sheer joy of the sport. Perhaps Phil’s mind turned to certain putatively professional cricketers, pulling in five or even six-figure sums, and hysterical at the
slightest
suggestion of an extra net, ten minutes desultory fielding practice, or the very idea of belittling themselves sufficiently to make
deus ex machina
appearances in between Test state games. True sport, I’m sure, can only ever be amateur. Budgetary restrictions being what they are, the British challenge does not have available cash for expensive trendy extras. Sport psychologists count as such and so Cudmore and Spedding thought it only fair to lift a few ideas from the crews of their rivals.

‘And by the way, no sex,’ suggested Spud one morning, almost subliminally, in his early morning team talk; ‘absolutely no sex during the elimination rounds’.

The stunned silence was finally broken by one all-macho winch-grinder. If normal conjugal relations were to be banned, he threatened, then he, for one, would just have to take the matters into his own hands, behind the back of the sail shed.

We could have stayed all day with Spud, listening to tales of alcoholic admirals, outrageously rude commodores and unstoppable yachting bores.

My favourite Spud story is about the lord, who, having heard similes about a man of his station, duly proceeded to get as drunk as one. It was in the heyday of those majestic vessels, the J-boats, and His Lordship, in a fairly plastered condition, fell asleep below deck one evening, and awoke to find the ship once again at sea.

‘Would you care to take the helm, my lord?’ asked the captain, with due deference, when His Lordship emerged finally.

‘No thank you, Smithers,’ replied His Lordship blearily; ‘I never touch a thing before breakfast’.

Or perhaps the other tale, which Spud tells in his own inimitable fashion, about the Algernon Cleft-Palate-Smythe-type yachting bore, who collared the retired Admiral in the Royal Thames Yacht Club, and insisted on regaling him with the tedious minutiae of some competition he had once been involved in.

‘And it was probably the Wednesday, no there again it might have been the Thursday, because on the Wednesday it was the ebb tide and then on the Thursday we had the flow tide . . . no there again it was my wife’s sister’s birthday on the Tuesday, I remember because we took her out to Claridge’s, and the day after we had the flow tide . . . and there we were sailing to leeward . . . no there again we must have been sailing to weather . . . because I remember saying to old Buffy . . . I remember saying, “Buffy, old man, Buffy, there’s only one way to sail this boat, and that’s to weather” . . . and Buffy said to me . . .’

The epic non-drama dragged on for a further ten minutes, as the Admiral’s faraway look became progressively further and further. Finally, he had had enough.

‘Carruthers,’ he shouted, summoning one of the discreet and impeccably dressed, stony-faced flunkies whose mission it was to emerge magically from the Club’s gin and tonic mists whenever needed.

‘Carruthers, come over here like a good man, and listen to the rest of this fellow’s story for me.’

We left Spud and the British challenge to deal with the bent mast, and returned to Perth for Phil’s team meeting. Unfortunately, listening to Spud’s tales of sailing folklore, I had omitted to ask him the one question that had been preying most on my mind. What was actually meant by a twelve-metre yacht?

‘It’s odd,’ I mused to Phil. ‘I had always assumed it meant the length of the boat, but now I’ve just read that Bondy’s victorious
Australia II
measured 64’ 7”, which makes it twice as long as twelve metres.’