Читать книгу The Botham Report - Ian Botham, Ian Botham - Страница 10

‘His [Dexter’s] habit of opening his mouth and walking straight into it had ensured that a man once considered merely an eccentric was developing a reputation for being dangerously out of touch.’

Under the captaincy of Graham Gooch England had made a better fist of things in the final Test of the 1988 summer series with West Indies. They still lost, by eight wickets, but at least England played as though they were a team rather than the disorganised rabble that had been on show previously, and they finally brought to an end a run of eighteen Test matches without success when they beat Sri Lanka in a one-off Test at Lord’s.

On purely cricketing grounds Peter May, the retiring chairman of selectors, must have been relieved to be able to appoint Gooch to lead the winter tour party to India. But that feeling turned to dismay once again almost immediately. From the moment Gooch was appointed speculation was rife that the Indian government, hard-liners on the issue of sporting links with South Africa’s apartheid regime, would object to Gooch’s presence. And when, two days after the squad was announced on 7 September, the Indian government announced that no player ‘having or likely to have sporting links with South Africa’ would be granted a visa, the cancellation of the tour was only a matter of time.

In their defence the Board pleaded that there had been no objection to Gooch as a member of England’s World Cup party the previous year, but the powers that be must have known that the Indian government had stretched a point so as not to cause problems.

In fact, earlier in the summer Gooch had already decided not to tour India with England in 1988 but to take up the offer from Robin Jackman, the former England bowler and now the Western Province coach, to spend the winter over there in South Africa. But when he was sounded out by Doug Insole of the TCCB and asked if he was prepared to travel to India as captain of the side, Gooch said yes.

Once again the Board had allowed their lack of foresight to make them look just plain daft. Why had they not foreseen the question of the blacklist? And if they had, was it not plain arrogance that led them to believe they could sweet-talk the Indian government if things got difficult?

Finally, after two seasons of complete shambles, the Test and County Cricket Board decided to take swift and decisive action over the future course of the running of the England cricket team and its public image.

Towards the end of the year it was decided that, in future, the England team should be the responsibility of an England committee, and the next step was to decide who should lead it. To that end the county chairmen entrusted this task to a two-man working party comprising A C Smith, the chief executive, and Raman Subba Row, the chairman. Subba Row, the man who had sanctioned the £1,000 hardship bonus to Gatting’s 1987 Pakistan tour party, now had another brainwave. He reasoned that England needed a strong figurehead in charge, someone whose reputation as a cricketer would leave no room for criticism, and a man with the kind of charisma and public persona that would send off the right signals in the world of cricket. So far so good. The problem was his choice: ‘Lord’ Ted Dexter.

The next the county chairmen heard of developments was at the winter Board meeting at Lord’s in January 1989. They had gone there to discuss the Board’s position with regard to overtures being made to England cricketers by Ali Bacher, the leading figure in South African cricket and later to become the head of the Unified Cricket Board.

Rumours had been circulating regarding a ‘rebel tour’ set up by Bacher and the chairmen discussed how the situation should be handled when push came to shove. At the end of the meeting Subba Row threw in, almost casually: ‘By the way, gentlemen, I think we may have settled on the man we are looking for to chair the England committee. Ted Dexter.’

Chris Middleton, the controversial chairman of Derbyshire who, four years later, orchestrated the moves to oust Dexter, takes up the story. ‘I knew very little about Dexter apart from the fact that he had been a marvellous Test batsman for England, but at the time we as county chairmen were happy to hear that one suggestion had at last been put forward. We were told by Subba Row that this had to be kept secret and that we should tell no one, and we all agreed. I didn’t even tell my wife.

‘Nothing more was said or heard on the subject for a couple of months. Then, one evening in late March, I was at home watching television and saw Raman Subba Row, his wife Anne and Ted and Susan Dexter dressed up for an evening out and heard Dexter announce that he had been appointed the new chairman of the England committee, the new chairman of selectors.’

Dexter had been installed, all right, but with absolutely no reference to the county chairmen. And the decision of Subba Row and Smith to present them with a fait accompli caused severe consternation. Many chairmen felt that Subba Row had overstepped the bounds of his authority and they never forgave him for it. They had thought that any firm proposal by the working party would be ratified by them before being allowed to take place. No such procedure took place. And that was not the only surprise in store.

The England committee was to comprise Dexter as chairman, Micky Stewart, the England coach, and the captain, whoever that may be.

And in a further move unbeknown to the chairmen at the time, Subba Row also decreed that the committee was to be joined and influenced by another figure, namely the chairman of the TCCB cricket committee, Ossie Wheatley, who was to have the veto over the committee’s appointment of England captain.

Subba Row believed the Board needed this safeguard on the England selection panel because of what had happened the previous winter. Such an unholy mess had persuaded him that a man with a broader view of the whole picture should be included in the selection process.

But by effectively taking one of the primary functions of the England committee, namely the final say over the selection of the captain, out of their hands, Subba Row merely undermined their authority over the process. The potential for confusion was enormous.

And so it came to pass when Dexter was called upon to make his first decision as the new chairman of selectors – the choice of England captain. Three names were mentioned: David Gower, Mike Gatting and Graham Gooch. Dexter interviewed Gower and Gatting but not Gooch and it became clear quite quickly that the Essex man was never in the frame. Presumably he didn’t fit into Dexter’s idea of the required new style of leadership. Not surprising really as in his previous role as newspaper pundit Dexter had written in the Sunday Mirror that Gooch’s captaincy at The Oval Test against West Indies in 1988 had the effect on him of a ‘slap in the face with a wet fish.’

Gooch had offered the perfectly reasonable assertion that ‘a team is only as good as the players. Nobody can turn a bad team into a good one.’

Dexter thought better. This was his responese: ‘No wonder the England team is in such a sorry state if that is the general atmosphere in the dressing room … A captain must make his men feel that everything is possible. The Gooch approach means that the West Indies were inevitably going to win at The Oval and that he was resigned to that result before the game began. Translate his theories on to the battlefield and there would never be a victory against the odds. David would never have killed Goliath because it wasn’t worth a try.’

Steady on, Ted.

The full story of how Gower was chosen ahead of Gatting, and for that matter Gooch as well, did not come out until it was made public by the England committee at the end of the disastrous Ashes campaign of 1989, presumably in order to deflect some criticism away from the selectors over what had happened that summer.

According to the story it was Gatting rather than Gower who had been the first choice of Dexter and Stewart. Indeed, prior to the appointment the rumour-mill had gone into overdrive predicting that the Middlesex man had the job in the bag. Enter Ossie Wheatley.

Wheatley was a former captain and chairman of Glamorgan and a contemporary of Dexter’s at Cambridge. But ninety-nine per cent of county cricketers would not have known him had they fallen over him. Wheatley, it was said, had decided that the time was not yet right for Gatting to be reinstated because of the events that had happened during his previous term of office. Wheatley was ostensibly mainly concerned with Gatting’s public row with the Pakistani umpire Shakoor Rana in the Faisalabad Test on the 1987–88 tour and other examples of poor behaviour.

It was never said publicly, however, but most of us were convinced that it wasn’t only the behaviour of Gatting and his team during that winter that led to Wheatley employing his veto. Quite clearly, according to the story, the business involving Gatting and the barmaid at Rothley Court in the early part of the summer of 1988 had had a large bearing on Wheatley’s decision.

Wheatley informed Dexter and Stewart that Gatting should not be considered and the new England committee turned instead to David Gower.

Not a great way for Dexter’s ‘Brave New World’ to begin. And as the summer progressed many commentators were crying out for a return to the cowardly old one.

The explanation that Dexter had originally wanted Gatting ahead of Gower has always puzzled me. I never thought of Gatting as Dexter’s type of captain. Clearly Micky Stewart would have wanted Gatt, as he was the captain on Stewart’s and England’s successful expedition to Australia in 1986–87. He was also captain when England reached the final of the 1987 World Cup. Stewart and Gatting were very similar in their approach to the game and got on well. On the other hand, Gower, all elegance, grace and style was much more Dexter’s cup of tea. Perhaps Graeme Wright, then the editor of the Wisden Almanack, writing his notes in the 1989 edition, came closer to the truth than anyone thought at the time. He wrote, ‘As much a surprise as the veto was the discovery that Dexter should have wanted Gatting as captain in the first place.

‘In the three weeks before the new committee met to choose the captain, Gower was generally thought to be Dexter’s favourite for the job; he was the one the new chairman singled out for mention. However, no decision was made at that meeting, which was said to have contained “detailed discussion”. Five days elapsed before Gower was accorded a press conference at which Dexter announced that he was “the committee’s choice” to captain England for the series.

‘There was just a hint that he might not have been everyone’s choice.

‘The trouble, when things are kept secret, is that people start to look around for explanations other than the authorised version. I have always been one for conspiracy theories. For example if Dexter wanted Gower, and knew that his number two, Stewart, wanted Gatting, the veto could not have been more in Dexter’s favour. It gave him the captain he wanted and prevented an initial disagreement with Stewart. The existence of the veto was known from the outset to the four men on the committee, and Dexter looked the sort who was at home walking the corridors of power. Of course it is equally possible that, sometime in March, Stewart persuaded Dexter that Gatting was the man for the job.’

As Wright suggests, it is equally possible that Dexter enlisted the help of Wheatley, his old Cambridge colleague, to do his dirty work for him.

Whatever the truth, all this was to remain secret, particularly to Gower, until the end of the summer, although the curly-haired one did get an inkling that all might not be well at the press conference to announce his appointment. Micky Stewart sat there quietly, with thunder in his face, barely uttering a word. Then when Dexter was asked whether the decision to appoint him had been unanimous, he answered somewhat mysteriously, ‘After a long discussion, David was the committee’s choice.’

At first the Gower-Dexter dream ticket did engender a certain amount of optimism and hope. And at that stage Allan Border’s Australians offered little cause for alarm for the forthcoming 1989 summer Ashes series. Although the tourists made hay against the Duchess of Norfolk’s XI in the traditional curtain raiser to the international season at Arundel, then against MCC at Lord’s, they lost against Sussex in a one-day match and then lost their opening first-class match of the tour to Worcestershire by three wickets. They then got into their stride against Middlesex and Yorkshire, winning both matches easily, but with a Texaco trophy shared 1–1 and one game tied, the stage was set for a close and competitive Test series.

It turned out to be anything but.

England were not helped that summer by an extraordinary catalogue of injuries to key players, myself included, and the distractions caused by the recruitment of the South African rebel tourists. But the selectors did not help their cause by making the extraordinary decision to ditch Chris Broad after only two Test matches. Broad, who had scored four hundreds against Australia in the last five Tests including three during the 1986–87 Ashes series at the end of which he was named the Man of the Series and International Cricketer of the Year, was certain to be Graham Gooch’s opening partner for the first Test at Headingley but, although he performed adequately there he was out on his ear by the time England contested the third match at Edgbaston. As he later signed up for the South African rebel tour, the second Test at Lord’s was the last time he played for England.

By then, however, with Australia 2–0 up after two Tests, it was obvious that Border’s team was a vastly different proposition to the one we had faced in 1986–87. Player for player there didn’t seem to be all that much difference between the two squads. The greatest single factor in their supremacy, however, was an almost obsessive hunger for success brought to the Australian side by their captain.

It became clear quickly that Border and his coach Bobby Simpson had left nothing to chance in their preparation for this series. They had been on the wrong end of hammerings in 1985 and 1986–87 and they had spent the intervening two years developing a side full of players whose commitment and dedication to the cause was unquestioned. Furthermore, Border himself had undergone a transformation of character and approach.

Border had made himself unpopular with some of his team-mates by insisting that their wives would not be able to join them in the team hotels at any stage on tour, and each player was made fully aware of what was required on and off the field. Border himself set the tone for how he wanted his team to play and it was an inspiration to them.

I was not the only one of the England players who had forged a reasonably close friendship with AB over the years and it was his approach to me that led to my decision to sign up for his state Queensland during the winter of 1988. Throughout the 1985 summer series in England Border had been a frequent and welcome visitor to the England dressing room at the close of play, so often, in fact that his closeness to myself, Gower and Allan Lamb caused some ill-feeling inside the Aussie camp – fraternising with the enemy and all that nonsense.

After the 1986–87 series ended in another England victory Border was again criticised for what the Aussies back home perceived as an over-friendly relationship with the old enemy. The criticism stung this intensely patriotic Australian and this time round he had made a definite decision to become Captain Grumpy of a collection of players prepared to snarl, sledge and play dirty if necessary. His approach was not necessarily one I would have adopted, but the results spoke for themselves.

While Gower was displaying all the politeness and good manners that Dexter had wanted his team to show, Border just got on with the job of stuffing the Poms. Robin Smith, the Hampshire batsman who had come into the side the previous summer against the West Indies, was clearly shocked by Border’s ruthlessness on the field. It was not just the sledging he encouraged from bowlers like Merv Hughes and Geoff Lawson but the fact that Border went out of his way to be positively unpleasant to Smith and all the other batsmen at all times. No one minds a spot of sledging or winding up the opposition, but in my book they went too far and AB took them there.

Smith recounts the tale when, during a particularly hot and tense period of play during one of the Test matches, more out of courtesy than anything else he asked Border if it would be okay for our twelfth man to bring on a glass of water for him. Border’s reply shocked Smith. ‘What do you think this is, a f * * *ing tea party? No, you can’t have a glass of water. You can f* * *ing wait like all the rest of us.’

When Gower quizzed his opposite number over the change in approach, Border told him, ‘David, the last time we came here I was a nice guy who came last. I’ve been through all sorts of downs with my team, but this time I thought we had a bloody good chance to win and I was prepared to be as ruthless as it takes to stuff you. I didn’t mind upsetting anyone, my own team-mates included, as long as we got the right result.’

In the face of such open hostility England needed to be at the top of their game. Planning and preparation and tactics needed to be spot on and the players all needed to be focused and pulling for each other. Above all we needed clear leadership and direction from the top.

What we got, from the first Test at Headingley to the last at The Oval was none of the above and the result was chaos.

At Headingley we were treated to the first example of Dexter’s knack of making eccentric decisions when it really mattered. Quite apart from leaving out off-spinner John Emburey thus sending England into the match with an all-seam attack, Dexter persuaded Gower that if he won the toss he should send Australia in to bat first. The decision to field first was apparently based on Dexter’s belief that an approaching build-up of cloud might allow movement through the air. No cloud came but there was movement through the air all right, generally from the middle of the bat to the boundary.

Furthermore, the decision to bat first came from the fact that while watching the weather forecast on breakfast television on the first morning of the match, Dexter had apparently seen enough to convince him that the match was going to turn out to be a rain-shortened three and a half day contest. In the event, of course, not a drop fell. England won the toss, put Australia in and on a belting batting track watched them score 601 for seven declared on their way to victory by 210 runs.

The tone was set for the series. And by the end of the third day of the second Test at Lord’s the Ashes were as good as in Australia’s hands. At that point, England, with Gooch, Broad and Barnett gone, needed another 184 runs to avoid an innings defeat. At the press conference afterwards Gower snapped when, after a question from former England colleague Phil Edmonds who suggested that Gower had put every single one of his bowlers on from the wrong end, the England captain stood up and hurriedly announced he had a taxi waiting. Gower got a flea in his ear from Ted, followed by the notorious chairman’s vote of confidence, but although he went out and scored a quite brilliant hundred on the Monday it was not enough to save the day. The series was only a third of the way through, but Gower realised the game was more or less up.

By the time I returned to the side after injury for the third Test at Edgbaston I could see there were problems inside the camp. Gower and Stewart were clearly rubbing each other up the wrong way, when, that is, they were bothering to speak to each other at all, Ted seemed to be in a world of his own and too many of the players appeared to have the upcoming announcement of the South African rebel tour on their minds to concentrate on the job in hand. While the Australians were all pulling in one direction, we were pulling ourselves apart.

Speculation had been rife all summer. And throughout that Old Trafford Test the dressing room resembled the headquarters of MI5. Whispered discussions over who had signed up and who hadn’t and sudden silences dropping like a guillotine whenever a player not party to the skullduggery happened to enter the room – looking back on all the goings-on, the situation was absurd. I found it sad that England players did not have enough on their plate concerning themselves with events on the pitch. I’ve never known an atmosphere like it and if anyone needed any proof that some of the England players cared less about playing for their country than their Australian counterparts, this was it.

On the final morning of the fourth Test at Old Trafford the tension lifted when the party of sixteen players who had signed up on the rebel tour to South Africa that winter was finally announced, but I believe all the uncertainty created by the recruiting could easily have been avoided had Dexter and Stewart taken hold of events from the start.

What was inexcusable was that, as well as Gatting, who had already told Micky Stewart he would not be available for the winter tour to West Indies, presumably because he was going to be playing cricket elsewhere, the identities of several of those being targeted by the South Africans had been known to Stewart and Dexter for some time. Gower was convinced that they had an awful lot of information which they did not pass on to him. He could have done with it, if only to decide in his own mind who he was going to persevere with during the summer series. There was little point him playing some of the guys who were not going to be around for much longer and three of the players named in the South African squad were involved in that fourth Test – Tim Robinson, John Emburey and Neil Foster. A fourth, Graham Dilley, had been selected to play but was unfit on the first morning, and five of the others in that sixteen-man party – Gatting, Chris Broad, Paul Jarvis, Phil DeFreitas, and Kim Barnett – had already played in the earlier Tests of 1989. The TCCB had been aware of what was going on and had asked players who were in line for selection for the winter tour to West Indies to indicate whether they would be available or not. Dexter and Stewart had known for some time the names of many of those who had signed up, yet they never uttered a word to the captain or even attempted to keep him in the picture.

Indeed, when Dexter handed Gower a sheet of paper with the names of the rebels on the first morning of the Old Trafford match, the captain was more flabbergasted by the fact that his chairman already knew the names in advance of their release by the South African organisers than at their identities. How long had Dexter known? And why didn’t he let Gower know as soon as he found out?

When Gower found out just how much had been kept from him he was understandably bitter that the two men had not deemed it necessary to take him into their confidence. He pointed out that had he known everything that the chairman and manager had known there is no way he would have agreed to certain aspects of team selection, particularly the recall of Robinson, who was included for his first Test of the series in the full knowledge of Dexter and Stewart that it would be his last match for England.

Dexter himself later claimed that he had wanted to take decisive action, that he had wanted to put the players on long-term winter contracts to reduce the likelihood that they would make themselves available for the South African expedition. And after this bitter lesson the TCCB allowed him to go ahead with that plan. But there is no doubt in my mind that he should have let Gower know what was going on. Keeping quiet was unfair on Gower as he was always going to be the one who carried the can for England’s poor performances on the field (as he later did, when Dexter and Stewart shoved it in his hands).

Perhaps Gower should have made more strenuous efforts to find out himself. But most of the time he probably had other things on his mind – most obviously trying to get England to play like an international cricket side.

Perhaps the saddest aspect of the end of the affair was that it overshadowed totally the contribution made by Jack Russell in that Test match, displaying fighting qualities sadly lacking in others and managing to concentrate on the task in hand of giving his all for the team when all around was a confused shambles.

Russell batted for 5 hours 51 minutes to make his maiden Test hundred of 128 not out, and in any other circumstances his example would have been an inspiration to his team-mates. Selected for the first Test at Headingley, he was given a torrid time by the Australian fast bowlers Merv Hughes and Geoff Lawson; so much so, in fact, that many commentators suggested he did not have the technique or the guts to play against short fast-pitched bowling. He noted the criticisms and, prior to the second Test at Lord’s, decided to do something about it. The day before the match he spent hours in the nets sharpening his reflexes against groundstaff bowlers chucking orange practice balls at him, and the hard work paid off when he made 64 in England’s first innings there.

Very much in the mould of my old mentor Ken Barrington, Russell had red white and blue coursing through his veins. It meant absolutely everything to him to play for England. As it did for the Middlesex bowler Angus Fraser, who made his debut at Edgbaston, and while Robin Smith was not born in England, the native South African showed more pluck for the fight than many of his English colleagues. Yet all their efforts were obscured by the controversy surrounding players who decided to turn their back on England. Smith made another 100 in the fifth Test at Trent Bridge but it was to no avail as Australia won by an innings and 180 runs and although England improved to draw the last Test at The Oval, it was widely expected Gower would resign the captaincy.

All through the series the mood had fluctuated between despair and disbelief. Injury after injury meant that England were never able to pick their side from the squad originally selected. And the farce reached a spectacular climax at The Oval when England went into the final Test with a seam bowler, Alan Igglesden of Kent, who Stewart helpfully described as ‘England’s 17th choice’.

According to Gower, ‘We replaced Moxon and Curtis with Hussain and Stevenson, but no sooner was the team released, than the usual business of people dropping out started up all over again. Malcolm’s back went, Fraser did his knee, and DeFreitas, called in as a replacement having reversed his original decision to go to South Africa, pulled a hamstring. We replaced DeFreitas with Greg Thomas, who said, “Sorry, I’m DeFreitas’s replacement for South Africa”. Norman Cowans and Riccardo Ellcock were both contacted at Middlesex and both reported unfit, and Glamorgan’s Steve Watkin was described as too jiggered to stand up for five days. I’m not sure whether I laughed or cried. We eventually ended up with two bowling places still to be filled the day before the game, and to add to the confusion, Ted, Micky and myself all came up with two different names. Eventually, through a combination of phone calls, and me handing over the final pick to Micky out of sheer exasperation, we settled on Derek Pringle and Alan Igglesden of Kent. This brought us up to 31 players for the series, and if there had been any plans for an end of term dinner, we would probably have had to cancel for the lack of a big enough restaurant. Morale, as you might have expected, was not exactly sky high.’

Dexter’s brave new world had come crashing down around him. Perpetrator of a catastrophic misreading of conditions at Headingley, his policy of keeping Gower in the dark over the defections was equally misguided. And his habit of opening his mouth and walking straight into it had ensured that a man once considered merely an eccentric was developing a reputation for being dangerously out-of-touch.

After Devon Malcolm had made his debut in the fifth Test at Trent Bridge, Ted Dexter, having been asked for any plus points he could think of from the match, answered by saying, ‘Who could forget Malcolm Devon?’ Then, at the final press conference after the match Ted set the seal on an unhappy summer by insisting, ‘I’m not aware of any errors we might have made.’ The first of these Johnstonesque bloomers in dealing with the media were only a hint of things to come.

Gower was resigned to losing the captaincy at the end of that summer series. In fact, he had thought very seriously about chucking the job in himself. In the end he never got the chance to, because Dexter sacked him anyway. But neither he nor I was prepared for what happened next.

Micky Stewart had been discussing with me all summer long my availability for the winter tour to West Indies. I had been approached by the rebel agents who told me they were prepared to break the bank to sign me up. I was not keen to go, but the money on offer was staggering, so I decided to call their bluff by asking for £500,000 for a three-year deal, knowing full well that was way above what the others were getting and confident that they would not be able to come up with the goods. Furthermore in my heart of hearts I wanted to tour the West Indies. They were the one country against whom I still felt I had something to prove. And I told Micky very early on in the piece that I was more than ready to try. In fact we had already discussed plans for the winter strategy and Micky left me in no doubt that he wanted me there.

Dexter, apparently, had other ideas. Making a mockery of his earlier unflattering description of Gooch, Dexter decided that the ‘wet fish’ should lead the side in the West Indies. Neither David nor myself had cause to fear that this would have a negative impact on our chances of touring. Although Gower had been told by Dexter and Stewart at the end of the meeting when Gower was relieved of the captaincy that they believed a change of direction was necessary, he had no reason to believe he would not be taking the journey with them. And I was looking forward to doing all I could to help a new team develop.

But in a decision which smacked of dictatorship from the top rather than a partnership between the management committee and the captain, Gooch was instructed by Dexter that neither Gower nor myself were to be considered for the tour. Later I got the impression that Gooch might not have wanted me anyway. But I was convinced that Stewart had done. Why else would he have spent most of the summer trying to persuade me to make myself available?

What bothered me was that the subject was not open to discussion. Dexter had made his mind up, and that was that.

As far as Gower was concerned, losing his place in the team was something that had simply not occurred to him as a possibility. He accepted that the decision to replace him as captain was probably correct. In fact he had intended to resign before being sacked but there was no question in anyone’s mind that Gower was worth his place in the side.

No question in anyone’s mind, that is, except the minds of those who mattered.