Get Her Off the Pitch! (21 page)

As an outsider, I felt that the rules of rugby would definitely benefit from simplification (how about having fewer players?). It also occurred to me that an excellent England reply to the New Zealand or South Sea Island
haka
would be a rendition of the Birdie Song. Nowadays the boys stare it down while the crowd sings ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot' to drown it out. But I still think a camp disco routine originating in the 1980s (with arm flapping) would be a great deal more effective in taking the wind out of their sails.

Among sports writers, it is generally agreed that the worst sport to cover is cricket. This has nothing to do with the game itself, just the life-destroying way in which it's organised, with a national team on tour to the Indian subcontinent for weeks on end, or to the Antipodes, or the West Indies. Such extended periods of travel in exotic lands sound lovely in theory, but it's an unusual marriage that can survive so many lengthy separations, and divorce is common. One of the big flash-points in the married lives of all sports writers must, I reckon, be the issue of holidays. Once international travel becomes a mere necessary evil, it's hard to think of it as a source of pleasure. Moreover, once you have been
everywhere in the world
, the main attractions of marriage and family are bound to be exclusively hearth-related. The end result is that the wife and kids stand no chance whatever of being taken abroad by you.

‘I fancy the Caribbean,' says the wife, wistfully.

‘Really?' huffs the sports writer. ‘Do you know what I fancy? I fancy sitting in the garden with this cup of tea.'

‘It's a long time since I had an exotic rum-based drink,' sighs the wife. ‘It's a long time since I had a cuddle with the dog,' comes the unanswerable reply.

The wife's chin wobbles. She gathers her children to her skirts and surreptitiously waves a freshly-peeled onion under their noses, so that tears stream down their little cheeks.

‘It would be really nice to stay in a hotel for once,' she sobs (she and the children have slept in their own beds every night for the past five years).

‘Well, send me a postcard when you get there.'

‘We all think you're being very selfish!' says the wife.

‘
I'm
being selfish?' he yells.

And so on, and so on, predictably, until the chap finds himself back in the press box in the Windward Islands, staring at his decree nisi and a tattered photo of his kids, sipping his tenth exotic rum-based drink of the day, dreading his hotel, and calculating on the back of an envelope how much of his salary will be left over to rent a small room in Bucks after all the alimony and school fees have been extracted from it at source.

Obviously I was not in this kind of fix myself. While I was sports writing I had a nice boyfriend who was very supportive of the enterprise. The longest I was away was five weeks in France in 1998. Since the boyfriend lived in Yorkshire and I lived in Brighton, he particularly approved of all the northwards driving I was obliged to keep doing. ‘I've got Elland Road next week,' I'd say, and he'd be jolly pleased and start tidying. He often told my friends and
relations the droll story of how I had asked him specifically, when we first met, whether he was interested in sport, and had said ‘Thank God' when he said he wasn't. I realised that this was his way of pointing out, ever so tactfully, that he had initially signed up for a literary and quite feminine sort of girlfriend who had turned, overnight, into this fixated sports fan who argued with strangers in pubs about the future for English goalkeeping. I did feel bad about this unlooked-for transformation, of course. I did worry - more for his sake than mine, really - that I was turning into a bloke.

However, the funny thing is, even knowing all this recipe-for-a-dismal-life stuff, if I had my time again, I reckon it's cricket I would go for, because it doesn't take much to see that cricket is by far the most rewarding game in the long run. It's not just that, being generally stringy and long of limb, the cricketer conforms to my personal taste in athletic frames (Australia's lanky Glenn McGrath embodying the ideal). It's that every match has potential for an enormous and fascinating range of outcomes. The way the game unfolds is simply more interesting than anything else offered by sport. It is designed to reward thought. Maybe it's the drugs I've been taking for this cold, but it seems to me there is a solid-geometry aspect to cricket: every development alters the three-dimensional shape of the game, turns it inside out, flips it round. Ricky Ponting is bowled for 23 (say), and the cubic limits of the possible have to adjust themselves so quickly and radically that you can almost feel the draught. On top of that, from an atavistic point of view, cricket is the spectacle of one lonely bloke at the crease, staunchly facing down a whole
pack of eleven other blokes, who surround him and his currently powerless partner like hungry hyenas and have no other purpose than to wear him out and tear him down. But hark at me. A woman who can't tell her deep square leg from her third man, or her extra cover from her backward point. Stop mainlining the Night Nurse, that's probably the answer. Stop taking that Night Nurse at once.

While I was on duty for Sport, there was a Test series visit from the Australians in 1997, plus the 1999 cricket World Cup. The World Cup was marked by some stupendous, epic one-day games, and also (sadly) by some quite remarkable post-match pitch invasions. These took the edge off some of the victories, I thought. The players were never able to clap each other on the back and enjoy the moment, because at the second the words ‘That's it' were spoken, they had to pull the stumps and sprint to the pavilion, dodging and slipping through a great crowd of spectators charging the other way. I happened to go to the theatre one night in the middle of the tournament, and at the resonant curtain line (‘Go, bid the soldiers shoot'), I felt a momentary impulse to duck under my seat, on the assumption that the audience would dash on stage and steal all the props while the actors fled for safety to the dressing rooms.

But the excitement of the crowds at the cricket World Cup was certainly understandable. Aside from the weird non-event of the final between Australia and Pakistan at Lord's (a dodgy business which has never been fully accounted for, in my view), it had all kinds of carnival atmosphere, all kinds of last-over drama, a bit of unseasonal sunshine (it was held in May and June), and some passionate
cricketers excelling themselves all over the country and in all areas of the game. The cricketer who made the biggest impression on me, I remember, was the young, scowling, skinny and fascinating Pakistani fast bowler Shoaib Akhtar. This was before Shoaib was officially classed the fastest bowler in the world, but even an ignoramus could see (as she tried not to swoon) that he wasn't exactly a slowcoach; also that his technique earned his team great results, and that he had magnificent nostrils.

I was sent to several matches, the first a supposed ‘warm-up' match at Hove between South Africa and Sussex which was rained off completely, and was not a good start. True, I met a lot of very nice South African cricket writers who talked lark dis, and I learned how to use a tricky, newfangled hot drinks machine in the press area - a life skill that has subsequently stood me in good stead. But in terms of raising excitement for the upcoming tournament, there was nothing. Covers were rolled up and then unrolled again. Men in blazers stood under umbrellas with their arms outstretched. Children played baby cricket on the outfield. Spectators stayed shivering in their seats because their bottoms kept the seats dry (there are few things more demoralising in life than getting up for a bit of a walk-round and coming back to a wet seat). There was a smell of beer and chips. I spent the day mostly under cover, fishing for information about the South African team (among them Allan Donald, Shaun Pollock, Hansie Cronje, Herschelle Gibbs) and getting a bit transfixed by the name Lance Klusener for the shamefully irrelevant reason that it reminded me of ‘Lars Porsena of Clusium' from the once popular reciting poem by Macaulay
about Horatius holding the bridge, with its famous thumping rallying cry, ‘Who will stand at my right hand,/And keep the bridge with me?'

My mother had recited parts of ‘Horatius' to me when I was a child - usually when I was ill in bed and too weak to stop her - and it had made an impression. Neither of us knew who ‘Lars Porsena of Clusium' might have been, incidentally, and all I know now is that he was a first-century Etruscan whose fabled attempt to invade Rome was turned back by the equally fabled heroism of Horatius. But it's a name that can truly stick in the mind when it comes in the first line of such excellent verse.

Lars Porsena of Clusium By the Nine Gods he swore That the great house of Tarquin Should suffer wrong no more. By the Nine Gods he swore it, And named a trysting day, And bade his messengers ride forth, East and west and south and north, To summon his array.

As things were later to turn out for the staunch Lance Klusener, the poem about Horatius holding the bridge all on his own (while it was destroyed around him) got more and more relevant as time went on. But this is to get ahead of ourselves.

My second match was England v South Africa on a pleasantly warm Saturday at The Oval. You may remember
this occasion. It was a bit like Armageddon. Sports fans never quite prepare themselves for outcomes as horrifying as this one was. We go along cheerfully thinking we know the extent of what can occur (‘We won the toss, tiddly-pom; what can go wrong, tiddly-pom'), and end up screaming, ‘Make it stop! For God's sake, make it stop!' The thing was, England opted to bowl first, then had a hard time making any headway against the opening batsmen (Kirsten and Gibbs had reached 111 runs before the first wicket fell), but then did a fair job keeping the South Africa total down to 225 for seven. Mullally bowled Kallis for a duck; Pollock (admittedly batting at eight) was out to Darren Gough first ball. I noticed that my new best friend Klusener was not out for 48. Apparently he was a terrific all-rounder, this stolid, sandy, bun-faced chap. He also spoke Zulu. He got more interesting all the time.

But I soon wished I hadn't known about that Zulu connection, because what happened next was pretty much the story of Rorke's Drift. England's openers Nasser Hussain and Alec Stewart went out (which in cricket should strictly be ‘went
in
') and came staggering back almost immediately, in a state of dumb shock, with the cricketing equivalent of six-foot spears sticking out of their chests. We watched in horror. They had got only two runs between them. Stewart had got none at all - and he was the captain! And from then on, well, it was a scene of carnage, basically. A classic, humiliating batting catastrophe. With terrific efficiency, the South African bowlers got the whole side out for 103 in 41 overs, the highest individual scores coming from Graham Hick and Neil Fairbrother,
who each clocked up a measly 21. It was Fairbrother I felt most sorry for on the day, despite his relative success with the bat. His honourable longevity at the wicket meant he had to watch at close range while, sickeningly, Hick fell, and then Flintoff, then Croft, then Gough. To adapt the famous line, he counted them all in, and he counted them all out again. Such a waste of young life, he must have thought. (Or alternatively, I suppose, what a bunch of tossers.)

My next match was quite an oddity, again involving South Africa. For reasons lost to history, the Kenya-South Africa first-round match was played in Amsterdam, which was more than a bit surreal. ‘Which way to the cricket?' is the sort of question that, in Holland, makes people assume you've been at the dodgy fags again. But it was true. In Amstelveen (a leafy suburb, with rustling trees) there was a serviceable cricket ground where a match could be played in an exceptionally laid-back atmosphere, if you know what I mean. ‘
TEST STATUS FOR HOLLAND NOW
' said a hopeful sign, and it got quite a few appreciative laughs. Had there not been a local transport strike that day (oh yes), a few more spectators might have shown up. But there were 3,500 people there, which was fine. There was a curious but familiar scent on the breeze. I spent most of the day sitting next to the Duckworth-Lewis official - a graduate of Brainbox University with a slide rule and calculator whose job was to apply a complex mathematical formula in the event of rain stopping play. He was extremely entertaining, this Duckworth-Lewis man. We had a great time. But so did everyone in Amstelveen that day, I think, aside from the hapless Kenyan team. In the
end, when the South Africans had won by seven wickets, we all said, ‘Is it finished?' and then we said, ‘Hang on, remind me where I am again,' and then we said, ‘Seven wickets? Wow. That's like, I mean, wow, seven.
Seven
? That's like, wow.'

Obviously, the main feature of the day was its weirdness - partly because it was
de facto
weird, but also because it was May 26, 1999, a date that lives in the memory of many English football fans because it was on May 26, 1999 that Manchester United played Bayern Munich in Barcelona in the Champions League final. Naturally, passing the day in a peaceful woody enclave outside Amsterdam, I had a very clear sense of being in the wrong place for the wrong fixture. On the plus side, however, I knew that if I could only overcome the serious transport difficulties of getting back to my hotel in time (the late Ian Wooldridge and I exhausted all our combined ingenuity to achieve this, and it was still touch and go), I could watch the match in the evening in my room on Dutch tv. A nearby bar in the heart of Amsterdam would have been a better setting, but as usual my hotel was sterile and out-of-town and didn't have a nearby anything, so watching in the room would have to do. And the great thing was, I could have a beer or two and get into my jim-jams. Best of all, I wouldn't have to make notes, because no one was expecting me to write about it.

So I was just dancing round the room afterwards shouting ‘Unbelievable, two goals in added time, amazing, what a very strange day, what a very, very, very strange day,' when my phone rang and the office said, ‘Did you watch it?' And I said yes of course I'd watched it, what
did they take me for, and by the way the pillows weren't halfway fluffy enough, if they really wanted to know. And they said, how about writing it up for the front of the paper? And I said, puzzled, ‘You do remember I'm in Amsterdam, not Barcelona?' And they said patiently that they did know this, yes. ‘I watched it in Dutch,' I explained. ‘Yes, but football is an international language,' they reminded me. So I switched on the laptop and turned in 800 criminally under-informed words in about half an hour, with an especially sinking heart because I knew my piece was destined for the front of the paper, rather than the back.