Читать книгу David Gower (Text Only) - David Gower - Страница 8

I WAS never tempted to play cricket, unauthorized cricket that is, in South Africa. It was nothing to do with any great moral stance, but I was strongly recommended against it by my advisers when the Breweries tour was being organized for the winter of 1981-82, and no approach was made in 1989 when I was England captain. The only time I have played there was in the mid-seventies, as a member of the Crocodiles touring team selected from seven southern England schools and captained by Chris Cowdrey. We were there for three and a half weeks over the Christmas holidays, visiting Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Durban, Bloemfontein and Johannesburg, and it was a fabulous trip. The cricket was good and the hospitality even better.

The rebel tour that Boycott organized in 1982, and which Gooch eventually captained, had sprouted its initial roots the previous winter during the England tour to the West Indies. There were a series of clandestine meetings, with shadowy figures emerging from hotel rooms, and various players were asked if they would be interested in a trip to South Africa should one be arranged. Most people kept their options open, waiting to see what sort of money was being offered, and it was all very hush-hush. It did not really gather momentum, however, until the tour to India the following winter. South African intermediaries would fly in, meetings were arranged in hotel rooms, and money was placed on the table. The standard plea, of course, was: ‘If you don’t want to come, fine, but please don’t blow the whistle on us.’

My agent, Jon Holmes, had told me that I would be risking too much from the commercial angle by going, and ‘Both’, whose solicitor had flown out to discuss the matter with him, received much the same advice. Simply as a cricketer I would love to have played there, but in practical terms it did not seem a good idea. There was no set punishment – as there was to be when Gatt skippered the 1989 side – but the players knew that repercussions were likely, among them a possible ban on playing for England. You don’t get paid that sort of money and go around behaving like an MI5 agent without suspecting that there might be a penalty clause. The code word, which still makes me giggle when I think back, was ‘chess’. So when someone wanted to talk to you about South Africa, he would sidle up to you and say: ‘Do you know how Karpov and Spassky are getting on?’ or ‘It’s a cool (k)night, but do you fancy a trip up to the Maharajah’s castle?’ However, once I had made the decision not to go, I never attended another meeting. Keith Fletcher, the captain, was another who turned it down, but Boycott, Gooch and John Emburey were strongly in favour. Graham’s tack was that ‘England never offer any guarantees’, and poor old Fletch quickly found out how true that was when he was sacked the following summer. Graham felt that money in the bank was worth more than any potential earning power he might or might not have by turning it down, and it is not always appreciated that he was a lot less confident of his own ability than he is now. He had been dropped before and his career had not blossomed to the extent that perhaps it ought to have done. When they came back from South Africa, and were fighting for their right to play for England, there was a certain naivety about their actions. When you are being offered figures that do not tally with normal cricketing rates, then you have got to assume that there is a price to pay. So although a three-year ban might have seemed harsh, it was nothing more severe than I had expected, and I cannot believe that those who went could have thought otherwise. I make no bones about my own reasons for not going. I was advised that it was likely to be commercially unfavourable for me. As for the 1989 tour, I was literally the last person in the dressing room to know, although South Africa had been a recurring theme almost every year. I had been out there on holiday many times between the two tours, and on one occasion in 1988 had been a guest of the South African Board at a couple of matches. The way I was pumped for information during those games left me in little doubt that another tour was on the cards. Even so, when the news broke during the Australian series in 1989, I had no real inkling before reading about it – like most people – in the morning papers. I can honestly say that had the organizers of the tour offered me a place, my answer would have been ‘No’.

Because my main ambitions all centred on playing cricket for England and for as long as possible, with or without the captaincy to worry about, resisting the kruggerand did, I think, turn out to be a sound commercial decision. And there is no doubt that I have earned a tidy living from professional cricket. It is not a well-paid sport, however, and while I will not have to spend my retirement years playing the harmonica at the bottom of tube station escalators, nor am I wealthy. I have a lovely house in leafy Hampshire, but when guests come to stay, I am not able to send the Rolls to meet them or offer them the choice of accommodation in east or west wing. Comfortable would be the right word, I think. I would be more comfortable but for a financial settlement after splitting with my former fiancee, and a property deal that singed the fingers, but by and large I have done reasonably well out of the game. I am not in the same league as another of my agent’s stablemates, Gary Lineker, and I certainly can’t afford to do nothing after cricket. Life after cricket, in fact, might require a change of lifestyle, and indeed a change of attitude. Like growing up.

Fortunately, I have been talented enough to earn wages at the higher end of the cricketing scale, but more importantly from the bank manager’s point of view, I have also had the good luck to be personally marketable. It is not quite true to say that I have sponsored cars to kitchens to lounge suits to underpants, but the spin-offs have augmented a fairly ordinary salary into one that has allowed me to pursue my various pleasures with a certain amount of style. A county cricketer’s wages, on the other hand, are not brilliant. It varies from club to club, and with sponsors playing a bigger and bigger role, certain players can command a useful basic wage. Sponsors helped Hampshire put together a very good deal for Kevin Curran when he was leaving Gloucestershire, comfortably above my own, but Northants in fact were able to top this by similar means. Yorkshire TV’s cash was also instrumental for Yorkshire to secure the services of Sachin Tendulkar, but the lesser players still have to scratch around for work every winter to make ends meet. A senior capped player’s basic last summer was between £12,000-£15,000, which is not a fortune. When I was captain of Leicestershire I was on £ 15,000 and although it was not the money that made me leave, I got a £10,000 rise by joining Hampshire. Had I taken Kent’s offer instead, I would have doubled what I was on at Leicester.

Clubs will often point out that a player is only required to do six months work, and he has the potential to augment this over the other six, but it very much depends on what qualifications or abilities he has. Some go on the dole, some drive milk floats. Some are driven out of the game because employers eventually decide they cannot afford to give them summers off, as happened to the Leicestershire fast bowler Peter Booth. There were players at Grace Road last winter coaching in the indoor school for about three pounds an hour.

Missing last winter’s tour to New Zealand and the World Cup might have cost me something in the region of £30,000, about half of which I would have recouped doing other things, such as contributing to the media and one or two other promotional ventures. My agent, Jon Holmes, has been my greatest ally, and I would be worth a lot less without his advice down the years. I have never signed a contract with him, or ever felt the need to. I had a good benefit year at Leicester, and when my earning power was at its maximum we shrewdly tied up a lot of my money in investments, some of which I have since had to sell in order to buy my current house. I do have the odd indulgence, such as a special edition Jaguar XJR-S of which I am very fond, buying paintings, and I have a lot of claret and port laid down in various warehouses so that if I ever do go broke I can either sell it or drink myself to death. I don’t spend my money on anything in particular, apart from music, and I gave up the flying lessons when I got Peter Lush’s bill for twenty minutes in the air in Australia.

If I leave cricket with no regrets at all, it is probably in the knowledge that I will never have to play another one-day game. Around the world it now attracts more spectators than Test cricket, but from a personal point of view, it was in the ‘watching paint dry’ category of enervation and excitement. I enjoyed it when I first started, probably because it allowed me to play bad shots with some sort of excuse. After a while, though, the repetition of the thing began to wear me down, and the fact that everything was geared – for the fielding side anyway – to the negative side of things. By and large, if a spectator turns up for the last fifteen overs he won’t have missed anything. It is purely about the result, otherwise you wouldn’t be standing there at extra cover wondering why the crowd was going bananas over a leg-bye. I enjoyed the day-nighters in Australia more, for the different atmosphere and theatre they generated, but they don’t stir my adrenalin quite like Test cricket. Latterly, of course, with fielding such an important part of the one-day game, I enjoyed it even less because my shoulder injury would not let me contribute properly. To be unable to do something you actually used to do reasonably well – in my case, throw the ball with slightly more grace than a shot-putter – was frankly depressing. Sunday League games were the worst, and I got to the stage where I almost got resentful about playing in them. The formula is numbing and unless the team is close to the top of the table, the game becomes the chore it shouldn’t be.

If there is a bonus to Sunday League cricket it is perhaps because you see fewer batsmen wearing helmets, owing to the restriction on bowlers’ run-ups. Ironically, the only time I have ever been badly ‘pinned’ was on a Sunday afternoon in 1977, during a rain-affected ten-over slog, when I top-edged a pull into my face. I first wore a helmet on my first tour to Australia in 1978-79. The idea had been around for a long time, and it was probably only tradition that prevented helmets from coming into general use many years before they did. The more macho characters resisted at first, some of them holding out for years, but very few players have never worn one at all. Viv Richards and Richie Richardson, in fact, are the only two who come to mind. It may have taken some of the romance out of batting, particularly for the spectators, but when you have just collected one on the cranium from the likes of Richard Hadlee, you tend not to dwell too much on the loss of some precious heritage: preservation of your head seems somehow more important. I’ve tried batting without one against quick bowlers, and I remember leaving it behind in the dressing room after tea during a Test against New Zealand at the Oval. I was feeling pretty confident – en route to a hundred – when Hadlee (hackles raised by my impertinence no doubt) let me have one, and it zipped off the side of my head for four leg-byes. He gave me a look that suggested I’d be better off going back to the dressing room to fetch it, but on the ‘lightning not striking twice’ principle, I carried on. Happily without further damage. It’s not a hardship, nowadays. It does get hot wearing one, but they are now quite lightweight and a long way removed from the old motor cycle crash hat. I’m sure that no-one who thinks properly about it would suggest that players should run the risk of serious injury when there is equipment on hand capable of preventing it. I have no truck at all with anyone who suggests banning helmets for either batsmen or fielders. There is the old argument that they make you less aware of danger, a bit like cycling through the rush-hour traffic plugged into a Walkman, but when you are twenty-two yards away from an object that could easily kill you, it really doesn’t cut much ice. I thought about not wearing one in Antigua in 1981, because I was in such good form, and was rather glad that I resisted the urge when Colin Croft crusted me with one that I had lost in the crowd. A lot of great batsmen have got by without one, but the history of the game is also studded with people who would have been a lot better off with one on. Nari Contractor, for example, required several blood transfusions and ended up with a fractured skull and a plate in his head after being hit by Charlie Griffith in the West Indies. I’m pretty sure Larwood and Tyson were something above slow-medium, but there have been some rapid bowlers around since I started playing, not all of whom appear to regard the bouncer as an occasional weapon.

‘Who was the fastest you ever faced?’ is a standard question, and although one or two m.p.h. here or there hardly matters when you are talking in the nineties, I think Sylvester Clarke might receive my vote on the strength of several deliveries at the Oval one day. He ripped the top of my glove off, and he would also bowl you the occasional delivery you simply never saw. He also had a genuine streak of meanness that made it additionally unpleasant to face him. Everyone gets worn down by fast bowling in the end, and I was certainly less keen to face it at thirty than I was at twenty. Barry Dudleston, who was a fine player for Leicestershire, told me that when he first came into the game that if anyone bounced him he said, ‘Thanks very much.’ However, when he was starting to get on a bit, he wasn’t so much thinking of four runs as staying out of hospital.

The game is nastier now, no doubt about it – verbally as well as physically. When you’ve got the two combined, someone bowling very fast at you and also being rather unpleasant, it can be highly disconcerting. If the world sledging championships were held tomorrow, you would have to install the Australians as 1/2 favourites, and they invented the term of course. On the other hand, some of those who have complained about them have thrown their stones from exceptionally large greenhouses. The West Indies, Pakistan and India are not too far behind them I’d say. It’s a hard old game today, not always edifying, and you can even find some high-class sledging in county cricket. It might be more acceptable if it was more witty, but most of it is very basic stuff.

Another perceived problem with the modern game is over-rates, although the authorities are convinced it is one of the major evils and the only cure is to impose harsher and harsher fines. It’s one of the few jobs in the world whereby the longer you work at it the less you get paid. Personally, I think the powers-that-be have become a bit paranoid about this question, although when play was still going on at twenty to eight against the West Indies at Lord’s in 1988 I might have had a different view on the matter. I would guess that the game has become a touch more professional now (maybe more cynical as well) in that the Don would never score 300 in a day 50 years on. The fielding captain would have put his men back, and ordered his bowlers to snap a bootlace twice an over. It’s sad for the spectators if this run feast dries up, but the modern professional will see it as a legitimate tactic. I did it in Lahore in 1984, when we set Pakistan a target on the last day, and Mohsin Khan and Shoaib Mohammad smashed the thing all round the ground. I had to slow it down, and we eventually frustrated them into giving away wickets. Fines may be the answer, and the spectators may deserve more for their money, but I’m pretty sure that if I had walked into that press conference in Lahore and said, ‘Sorry, lads, I could have saved the match, but it would have cost us five hundred quid apiece,’ then anyone picking this quote out of the morning papers would not, understandably, have been very impressed.

The respect in which I count myself most fortunate was to be born a batsman. There is a lot more glamour in scoring a century than taking wickets, and from a marketing point of view, it is also more lucrative than being a bowler. Endorsing bowling boots is not the sort of sideline calculated to make you rich, and players such as myself, Gooch and Robin Smith have made more money out of spin-offs than the likes of Dilley, Foster and Willis. The one source of income open to all, provided he puts in the required amount of service, is the benefit, and I picked up £105,000 tax free from my own in 1987. People will say that the benefit system was not really devised for the likes of people like me, more for the honest-to-goodness county pro who has not really had the chance to earn bigger money, and I would have a certain amount of sympathy with that. However, the common denominator is the reward for long service, to which all players – Test or county – are entitled, and if potential benefactors do not want to give to a player because they consider he is already earning enough money, then that is his or her privilege. Benefits are much more commercialized than they used to be, and in coming ever closer to the technical limits that are imposed upon them, may well attract the interest of the taxman at some stage in the future. In my year we did something like twenty theatre shows the length and breadth of the country, which were too close to being a commercial venture not to declare it to the Revenue as such. No player wants to queer the pitch for others who are following.

There have been any number of more successful benefits than my own, including some of the county stalwarts who deserve them most. Paul Pridgeon, for example, managed to raise £150,000 at Worcester, which came about through a combination of his own popularity and having very efficient people running the benefit for him. Others have not done so well, and when Graham Roope was awarded one with Surrey, it went so badly wrong that he almost ended up losing money. One or two Test players, myself included, have raised eyebrows by staging events outside the county they have been playing for, but when you perform on a higher stage your supporters are not all confined to one county. There is a publican near Worcester – inappropriately named David Drinkwater – who has been a supporter of cricket and cricketers for a very long time, and has been a great friend to players from all parts of the country. I had three lunches there during my year, and Worcestershire queried it with him. Quite rightly, however, he told them that it was entirely his business who he chose to help in this way, whether it be Worcestershire players or not. The only other point to make is that if you compare the modern benefit in real terms to benefits of twenty or thirty years ago, you will find that there has not been a vast increase in the rewards. If you costed W.G.’s benefit out on today’s retail price index he would have to be the wealthiest man who has ever played cricket. And he was an amateur.

Overseas players have been a bone of contention over the years, but I think they are good for our game. One argument against them has been that we have helped many become better players through county cricket, and then suffered because of it when they turn round and beat us in Test matches. Border would have taken home a lot of useful information from playing with Essex, likewise Hadlee, Marshall, Waqar Younis, Wasim Akram – the list is endless. However, I still think that it works both ways. Unless our own cricketers play with the likes of these people, they will become too insular. Where our system falls down is in having so many cricketers playing for so many different clubs. In Australia, for example, with only half-a-dozen state sides, the real talent is more concentrated, and this is why they have perhaps more player movement than we do in this country. If someone can’t get into the New South Wales team, but is wanted by Queensland, he will just up and move from Sydney to Brisbane. The fact that we have more players to pick from does not necessarily give us a stronger international team, and rather than taking on new counties like Durham, we should ideally be creating a smaller pool of top players. A smaller number of stronger sides, playing less but more intense cricket, would serve us far better at Test level.

Four-day cricket is also, I feel, the right way forward. It can, of course, be a tedious game at times, but it does have the enormous advantage of giving the stronger sides a better opportunity to win. There is certainly more scope for batsmen to occupy the crease (Hick, for example, might never have had the time to make 400 in a three-day match) and it also makes bowlers work harder for their wickets. More importantly, it is so closely related to Test cricket. Whatever system is employed, they have certainly got two things right after years of brainlessness. The extra day’s preparation for Test matches is so obviously a benefit that it boggles the mind to think that it has taken so long to be introduced, as indeed is the fact that Friday is no longer an automatic travelling day. Asking players to perform on a Saturday morning after spending ten hours on the road staring at the back of a caravan, was something that only recently occurred to the TCCB as unreasonable. All this legislation defining what professional cricketers do is passed by the chairmen of county cricket clubs, some of whom appear to have no better grasp of the mechanics of the game than I have of Serbo-Croat. The number of times that I attended county captains’ meetings and saw recommendations passed on that were either totally ignored or chopped to pieces, would make another book. You would make a proposal in September, disappear overseas for the winter, and come back to another captains’ meeting in April to find that the thoughts of what are supposed to be the seventeen or eighteen people closer to the game than anyone, had been deposited in the nearest wastepaper basket. The fact that the Professional Cricketers’ Association has never had anything like the influence at Lord’s as the county committees, has got to be slightly mad.

County committees are generally comprised of people who have the game at heart, but who are attracted to a club for any number of reasons, and to have them responsible for running the game is sheer folly. The captains, by contrast, are treated like schoolboys by the people at Lord’s. They pompously issue ‘we know best’ edicts from those offices next to the museum, when half of them should be in the museum themselves. It is very hard to monitor the game if you are not in the dressing room, and even though players can be selfish, short sighted and need monitoring by a higher authority, there is no excuse for their voice being as feeble as it is. You get people like Ossie Wheatley vetoing the appointment of an England captain. Why did he have that sort of power? Who on earth is he? There could have been very few county cricketers at that time who either knew who he was or what he had done in the game, and what is the purpose of appointing an England committee only for its decisions to be over-ruled by a face-less official deep behind the scenes?

Lord’s have only recently cottoned on to the idea of consulting umpires about players. They are closer to the action than anyone, and almost without exception, have played the game at a high level themselves. Our umpires are consistently better than they are anywhere else in the world, because of the experience that cannot be bought or acquired from an examination paper. They are familiar with players and their attitudes, and the fact that they have played the game automatically invests them with a cloak of authority. In places where this is not the case, such as Australia, the players find it almost obligatory to abuse their umpires from the moment they get onto the field to the moment they leave it – and that is probably one reason why so few ex-players don’t take it up. Someone like Tom Brooks, who was a pretty good umpire, more or less gave it up in 1979 when he gave Graeme Wood out caught behind off John Lever. It was a poor decision, but the flak he copped was unbelievable. How Tony Crafter, who is a lovely man and a fine umpire, has kept going all these years I don’t know.

I am more in favour of an international panel of umpires than so called ‘neutral’ officials. It doesn’t do Australia or England any good if they are saddled with a substandard Pakistani umpire, or indeed India or Pakistan any good if they get a poor one from us. The pressure on umpires these days is horrendous, with all the trials by TV and newspapers, and mistakes are highlighted and exaggerated more than ever. As for the idea of electronic aids, a kind of replay booth of the sort they have in American Football, I tend to think it would be a benefit. I love the theory and tradition of the umpire being the sole judge, and his word being law, but if there are technical aids that can help, then there has got to be a move towards using them. There are so many things for them to do nowadays, that to be infallible is more impossible than it ever was. The days when all they had to do was check the coat pocket for six marbles are long gone. As always with the game of cricket, traditional thinking such as ‘the umpire’s word is law’, remains at the heart of all discussions on the subject. At the moment, the technology that exists can only help with run-outs or stumpings. We will have to wait until there are foolproof methods for clarifying catches behind and lbw decisions, so that those dismissed erroneously in these ways no longer feel aggrieved by colleagues who have been reprieved by cameras ideally sited to deal with a contentious run-out.