A Beautiful Game Read online

  It was an argument I was never going to lose. At the age of thirteen I had my first Fearnley. Better still, Mum decided Dad’s visits to Soho had been virtuous. We went back each spring and then, one year, this old curiosity of a sport’s shop had gone, replaced by a Chinese restaurant. Alfred Jameson had played his last innings. Hopefully, he was with Peter Nicholas, both bemoaning the fact that the Nicholas son and heir was out in the middle with a bat that weighed more than it should.

  Six months later I started at Bradfield College in Berkshire. Initially, the days there were no better than at Fernden prep school but after a year a new housemaster took over and brightened up ‘G House’. Chris Saunders had won cricket and football blues at Cambridge and Oxford respectively and quickly understood the individual needs of boys in their early teens, who were often frightened and certainly alone.

  Chris had a real gift. He hammered the bad ’uns and stoked the good ’uns. He mixed leaders with losers and let them teach each other about both sides of the coin. He allowed Johnny Muir—addicted to nicotine by his mid-teens—to smoke in his own house rather than find him out at the bike sheds corrupting others with Embassy Regal or Player’s No. 6. He encouraged a lad whose parents lived in Borneo to make the long journey home worthwhile by coming back late after the Christmas holidays. Best of all as far as I was concerned, he encouraged everyone to play sport whatever their limitations.

  With a firm but always fair and light-hearted touch, he lifted the general malaise that had overtaken Bradfield—as it had so many of Britain’s schools during the early 1970s. Drugs, cigarettes and alcohol were more appealing to many teenagers than Dexter, George Best and David Duckham. Some grew their hair long and then, having rolled it into a bun, held it in place above their collar with pins and clips. When Mike Wright was badly tackled in a 1st XI football match, he hit the frozen ground with enough momentum to somersault forward and into the sideline crowd of masters and schoolboys. Out flew the pins and clips and, to Mike’s acute embarrassment, so too the bedraggled locks that hung halfway down his back. As soon as the match was over, our new housemaster frogmarched Mike to the school barber, where the hair was hacked off above the collar and looked ridiculous for the remainder of the term.

  In many ways I was lucky at Bradfield. Chris was a brave and enthusiastic wicketkeeper, who knew the game. The head of cricket, Dickie Brooks—another wicketkeeper—had played for Somerset. As one coach, Maurice Hill—formerly of Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Somerset—left for other pastures, John Harvey, the recently retired Derbyshire batsman, arrived in his place. I was picked in the 1st XI when I was fifteen and played in the team for four years, the last as captain. I never made enough runs but took wickets with decent outswingers at medium-fast. These three good men guided me on the path to my dream. I was way ahead of anyone as a captain and led an unbeaten team in my final year. Chris appointed me head of house and encouraged me to take charge of everything within my reach.

  The runs thing was odd. In my last year at prep school I made four hundreds, a remarkable tally for a thirteen-year-old. Possibly I pressed too hard at Bradfield. Maybe I was promoted too early for my fragile mental state and this had the reverse effect of holding back my performance as I played constant catch-up. Maybe I was too cocky and cricket was already teaching me about myself.

  I joined the Bank of England Cricket Club—Mum knew someone, or Dad had, and the ground was next door to home—and played for them in the Surrey League during my mid-teenage summer holidays. The earthiness of the cricket was appealing, more so than the nature of wandering cricket, which was formed around the old-boy network of the British public schools. Some of these clubs—Butterflies, Free Foresters and Stragglers of Asia among them—played against Bradfield during the school term, and my desire to beat them was every bit as great as my desire to beat other schools. With the benefit of hindsight, I now think that I had already latched on to the problem cricket faced with elitism. Bradfield boys had this magnificent ground—still one of my five favourite in England—and the chance to enjoy cricket as a way of life. Youngsters I knew around London had no such luck. There was a smugness about many of the men from the clubs who came to play us. This was not necessarily a conscious thing. It was inherent. The shame to me was that the institution of cricket would not spread its wings.

  Once, in a moment of jaw-dropping condescension, an opposing captain won the toss and asked what I wanted to do first. I thought sod him and set out to win the match at any cost. I replied that we would bowl first, to which he warmly agreed. I used our two best bowlers for most of the innings, operating to defensive fields with plenty of cover on the boundaries. We fielded feverishly, denying runs as if our lives depended upon it. By the midpoint of the match, the opposition were not more than 140 for 3 or 4.

  These were declaration matches, not limited overs and, on a flat pitch, 140 was nowhere near enough. But no club side of grown men could be seen to bat too long against schoolboys. The captain arrived at the wicket looking to push the score along but perished caught on the square-leg fence. He left red-faced. Another half an hour or so passed as increasingly exasperated gentlemen came to the crease, only to lose their wicket attempting to catch the clock. Eventually, about 40 minutes before tea, they declared 9 wickets down. We needed about 200 to win. I changed the order round, sending in a couple of hard hitters against the new ball and keeping the opening batsmen for later should the match need saving. It didn’t. We got off to a flyer. So much so that after tea we were able to pace ourselves. I got to the wicket with about 90 needed from the obligatory twenty overs in the last hour. We cruised home with time to spare and celebrated long and hard.

  In the summer holidays of 1975, I was asked to play for Middlesex Under-19s. I turned up at the Barclays Bank ground in Ealing to find I was playing in a team with Mike Gatting, who was one of the three stand-out young batsmen in England, along with David Gower and the less well-known Matthew Fosh. Though a year younger than Gatt, I hoped to have the chance to compare myself with him but I didn’t get in to bat. We won by 9 wickets. Gatt, who finished unbeaten with 70-odd, was in a different class, a completely different class. Within a couple of years, he was with England in Pakistan. I played a few more games the next summer but lovely old Jack Robertson—briefly an England batsman after the war—who ran the side, thought more of a couple of other lads who had grown up within his radar. Soon enough, I had moved on anyway.

  My mother had empowered me to fully embrace cricket. Thus, when the sun shone, I rejoiced. On those summer mornings when it rained, I pined. From the age of fifteen to eighteen, I turned down family holidays on the Isle of Wight, in the New Forest, to France and to Corfu so that I could catch bus and train, cricket bag in hand, to turn up everywhere and anywhere for a game.

  Dad may have gone but his memory lived on through this shared passion for cricket. A beautiful game was the friend to whom I had turned in September 1968 and the friend who remains firmly by my side to this day.

  CHAPTER 2

  Hampshire, 1977

  There were Jim the Fizz, Pops, Pokers and PT; Hillers, Murt, Elvis and Pissy Pete; Lew the Shag, Jungle Rock, Herbie, Trooper, Dougal and Dicey Rice. Most of us, and a few more, were based in a small room in the bowels of a pavilion building so dilapidated it was noteworthy that the council passed it fit for business. Assuming it did.

  Hampshire County Cricket Club was run by Desmond Eagar and had been since the 1950s. His second-in-command was the club captain, Richard Gilliat. My first year—as a wet-behind-the-ears triallist set on a life in cricket—was 1977, Desmond’s last. We freshers saw little of Eagar and not much more of Gilliat but there was no mistaking that they were in charge.

  We were the County 2nd XI, the Brat Pack, uncapped staff players who bowled in the nets in pretty much all weather. We ran the scoreboard at 1st XI home matches and helped the ground staff with the covers and such. We took turns to act as 12th man for the gods who lived in the little cottage upstairs: the capped
1st XI players. This was a mystical chamber into which we were rarely allowed. Entry to the first-team dressing room came via knocking and then permission, even as 12th man. This was a coveted role, simply to rub shoulders with some of the best players around—Barry Richards and Gordon Greenidge, for example, Andy Roberts, Trevor Jesty and Gilliat himself. But after a few days at it, you understood that the public-school fagging system was far from dead.

  First up, before play, you served the lads tea, coffee and a couple of digestive biscuits. At lunch you turned waiter for the bowlers or unbeaten batsmen—ham rolls usually, or the tasteless fare from the dining room, plus lashings of Heinz salad cream. At tea, you ran for cover if things were going badly out on the field but not before ensuring the sandwiches had been delivered by the kitchen and the teabags had drawn. If Hampshire was in the field, you made your way to the scorer’s hut to collect the bowling figures and deliver them to the captain. Weirdly, he tended to look in the maidens column first, as if maiden overs were the route to a pot of gold. Yes, wickets were okay, ‘but maidens, lad, maidens: give ’em fuck all’.

  Towards the close of play you filled the huge communal bath into which the naked gods descended as one, having supplied their order for drinks—beer, lager, Coke, orange juice or milk, mainly—and ran various other errands. That bath was an unhealthy thing all right, unless you got there first and were gone before the bowlers’ feet began their long and weary soak.

  I was first taken upstairs to this holy place by Mike Hill (Hillers), the 2nd XI wicketkeeper, when the first team were playing away from home and we were doing six-hour days in the nets. He showed me an enormously heavy bat, made from dark wood, that he said Barry Richards used in Sunday League games. He claimed it weighed 4 pounds, which I had no reason to doubt. It was enough for me to just to hold a bat used by Richards, the cricketer who could do no wrong in my eyes. Swooning, I made to drive, cut and pull, shadowing the great man’s stance and technique, with an exaggerated position of the left elbow and a flourish in the follow-though. But the bat weighed me down. The strokes seemed near impossible. This was a club, not a bat. What was I to believe? That Richards was immortally strong? That the journey I so badly wanted as the bookmark to my life was already beyond me because I could not lift the great warrior’s sword?

  Hill had now been joined by Nigel Cowley (Dougal, after the dog in The Magic Roundabout) and Tim Tremlett (Trooper, for his military gait and Roman nose). They began to laugh among themselves. This was no bat used in matches by Richards but a demo, made from oak, which he used to warm up immediately before going out to bat. It made his actual bat feel like a wand, allowing his muscles to adapt quickly to the challenge of the new ball. I disappeared to the bowels below, tail between my legs and their laughter in my ears.

  Hampshire was an old-school club: institutionalised in that shabby English way, financially poor but mainly happy. The place chugged along, just about breaking even in an age when no one talked about money, only manners. Eagar was as much headmaster as former captain and secretary. Much loved and respected, he was to die suddenly late that September, aged 59.

  Once, he offered the young leg-spinner Alan Castell a drink in celebration of his first five-wicket haul. ‘I’ll have a pint of bitter, please, Mr Eagar,’ said Cass. ‘Castell, a word in your ear,’ Eagar replied. ‘When a senior member of the club offers you a drink, ask for a half, Castell, a half. Now then, Castell, let me buy you a drink to celebrate your bowling today.’ ‘Thank you, Mr Secretary,’ said Cass, ‘I’ll have two halves of bitter, please . . .’

  Occasionally, something—or someone—arrived to break the ever-so-slightly-grey rhythm of life. To a degree, Castell was one of those but his cricket never kicked on and soon enough he too was one of the game’s lost souls. Long before my time was the first and very best of them, Colin Ingleby-Mackenzie, the Old Etonian who led the county to the championship in 1961 with outrageous flair and abandon. The stories of that summer have become the stuff of legend. Wild optimism; dashing parties in London decorated by beautiful ‘It’ girls; wads of cash laid down, won and lost track-side at Ascot; crazy declarations on the cricket field and miraculous victories from nowhere all came together to beat Yorkshire—far and away the best team in the land—to the championship title. When not gallivanting around London, Colin lodged at the Eagar family home in Southampton, frequently getting in as Desmond was getting up.

  Hampshire’s approach was well summed up by Ingleby’s response to the interviewer’s first question at the BBC Sports Personality of the Year night in London. ‘Well, Colin, this was quite a performance by your chaps. What was the secret?’ asked Peter Dymock. ‘Oh, I don’t know really. A bit of luck, I suppose,’ replied Colin, ‘and a simple enough rule that I wanted the chaps in bed by half past ten, to be sure that they got an hour’s sleep before the start of play.’ Boom, boom. ‘Gosh,’ or some such thing, said Dymock. ‘So it’s true, Colin, that you did it with wine, women and song?’ ‘Well, I don’t remember much singing, Peter,’ replied Ingleby, before howling with laughter.

  It was a long time before I came to know Colin personally but when I did there was no going back. He was the best of men—joyous, charming, generous of heart, spirit and pocket, and very funny. My greatest privilege was to be asked to speak at his memorial service at St Paul’s Cathedral, an occasion attended by almost two thousand people whose lives he had touched.

  Afterwards, the family gave a reception at the Merchant Taylor’s Livery Hall in the City. I was talking to Colin’s wife, Storms (née Susan Stormont-Darling), when a hard slap at my right shoulder caught us all by surprise. I spun round and there, tall and elegant and wearing a black velvet Fedora with a cream silk scarf draped around his shoulders, was Peter O’Toole. Can you imagine! ‘Bloody good, dear boy, bloody good. I did Lean there. It’s a fucking awful place!’ And then he smiled, the most majestic smile in all the world, and disappeared from view. I never saw him again.

  The last time I had seen him was on stage as the lead in Keith Waterhouse’s mischievous play Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, a role to which he was ideally suited. Years earlier, in the winter of 1979–80, we shared the same net in the indoor school at Lord’s. He was a mate of the coach and former England left-arm spinner, Don Wilson, and liked to hang out with the young wannabes of the professional game. On occasion, he would buy us Chinese dinner up the road after the nets were done. He was just about the most alluring man I have met. How anybody avoided falling in love with him, I do not know.

  ‘Lean’ was David Lean, who directed Lawrence of Arabia, and O’Toole was right about St Paul’s from a speaker’s point of view. Because you perform from the other side of the dome from the audience, you feel isolated and the sound of your voice feeds back at you—‘It’s a fucking awful place.’ Having said that, it is beautiful place too, and as I began to talk about Colin, the sun came out, flooding the circle beneath the dome with a golden morning light. It was as if his spirit had dropped in to reassure us that all was well upstairs and though today was very nice, we should dry up the tears and crack on without him from here on in. Truly, we could feel this spirit, and who was to argue with the most optimistic man any of us had known?

  After Ingleby, the white Barbadian Roy Marshall became the club captain. Marshall could really bat, the first of three truly great cutters of the ball that came from overseas to thrill Hampshire fans: Marshall; then Gordon Greenidge, also from Barbados; and finally Robin Smith, from Durban. But Marshall was a dreary captain or, if that is unfair, he was not a patch on Ingleby, who was the hardest act to follow. These were fallow years.

  The club trod water until the arrival of Richards in 1968. After Ingleby-Mackenzie, Richards was probably Eagar’s best signing, though it brought controversy because the South African was on a higher percentage of ‘talent money’ than the other players. (Effectively, talent money was a performance-based bonus. Salaries were negligible but talent money could make a summer’s work properly worthwhile.)

&
nbsp; Richards announced he would make 2000 runs in his first season and was scoffed at by the embittered old pros who played alongside him, especially when he failed on a green pitch in his first match. Though no one knew it then, Richards was among the finest batsmen on the planet. He made 2000 runs all right, and earned more talent money than the rest of them put together. Jealousy bounced all around the dressing-room walls. I was soon to discover that jealousy bounced all around the professional game.

  That first year, I lived with Nigel Popplewell—Pops—in a flat halfway up Bassett Avenue, the main drag heading north out of Southampton. We lived off cornflakes, and roast chickens that were half-eaten one night, left to fester for the best part of 24 hours in the bowels of the oven in which they had been cooked, and then finished off the next day. Pops had a red Mini that took us to and from matches and to the pub. Rather too often, it brought us back from the pub, too. If there was no chicken in the oven, it was a pie and chips from the joint around the corner that the health inspector eventually closed down.

  Pops’s father, Oliver, was a barrister before he became a judge—he chaired the inquiry into the Bradford City stadium fire—and was later knighted. He and my father completed national service in the navy together, which is how we all knew each other. One morning, we rolled out of bed for a game against the Middlesex 2nd XI in Winchester, gave the cornflakes a miss because the milk was rancid and hurried out to the avenue to find the Mini had been nicked. This was a blessing in disguise. Upon our hasty return to the flat to call both the coach, Peter Sainsbury, to tell him we would be late—not funny—and the police to report the theft—quite funny—we found the bathroom flooded and the floorboards giving way—very funny. The landlady, who lived in the flat underneath us, was banging at our door.