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Chapter Three

Up to Speed

Brian Johnston was always endearingly candid about the good fortune he had enjoyed at key moments in his life. His Old Etonian connections, like ‘Lobby’ de Lotbiniere at the BBC, served him well, and while talent, charm and charisma helped to establish him as a national institution, there have been any number of similarly talented, charming and charismatic broadcasters for whom doors simply have not opened. But let us not fool ourselves. Everyone needs a slice of luck to get started, but it still requires energy, hard work, skill and commitment to make a success of things from there. Johnners always made what he did look incredibly easy, and broadcasting did come naturally to him, but it would be entirely wrong to assume that because it all looked like second nature, his brain was not working nineteen to the dozen.

As a cricketer, I do not think I necessarily had the rub of the green. I might well have played more times for England than I did; but then, I should have made a better fist of the opportunities I did have. Anyway, I am long since over that disappointment. However, from the moment I retired at the end of the 1990 season I unexpectedly benefited from being in the right place at the right time, and from a series of lucky breaks which propelled me at alarming speed onto Test Match Special.

The Today newspaper, now defunct, was a tabloid chiefly famous for its attempt to break the monopoly of Fleet Street and for its pioneering efforts to publish colour photographs, which it managed with mixed success. I wrote a county cricketer’s diary during my last three seasons for Leicestershire, which one year was titled ‘Round the Wicket with Jonathan Agnew’. As you may imagine, this resulted in tremendous ribaldry in the dressing room, and the column was renamed the following summer.

Over the years many former players have turned to writing about the game, but for a national tabloid newspaper to appoint a practising cricketer with minimal training and no experience as correspondent was an entirely new development. It was not universally popular among other journalists, who – rightly, as it has turned out – feared that my appointment would be the start of a trend which would make it very difficult for writers who had not played county cricket, at least, to keep their jobs. Today, the chief cricket correspondents of The Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian are former internationals, and more past players write their own copy in newspapers than they used to.

It would be a great shame if the properly trained, cricket-loving journalist found that there was no longer room for him in the press box. Of course former cricketers provide an insight to the game that can only be gained through the experience of having been out in the middle. But ex-players are a rather cynical lot, and having treated the game as a job from a young age, our relationship with cricket is different to that of the fan. We can sometimes be a little jaded, and this is where the cricket-lover can shine, particularly in the coverage of one-day cricket, which has become tediously formulaic. The middle overs of a one-day international have now lost their momentum because of the introduction of ‘power plays’ early in the innings, in which the field restrictions encourage exciting batting. Maybe I have been unfortunate, but I seem to have watched a lot of games recently in which the team batting second loses too many early wickets, producing a dead match that drifts for up to forty overs before finally reaching its predictable conclusion. The last people to ask about the future of one-day cricket are the former players in television and radio commentary boxes. Few of us are enthused by that form of cricket any more, because we have seen too many dull, meaningless games. But it is an element of our job – all too often in recent years – to make one-sided one-day matches sound exciting. Part of a commentator’s brief is to ‘lift’ the programme when the cricket is boring.

This is never easy, and nobody is better at it than Henry Blofeld. His love and enthusiasm for the game shine through every delivery he describes, with his right foot hammering away under the desk. Where would Test Match Special be without Brian Johnston, John Arlott, Tony Cozier and Christopher Martin-Jenkins, none of whom played first-class cricket? The colourful and knowledgeable accounts that we read in the newspapers over breakfast would have been immeasurably poorer without E.W. Swanton, Neville Cardus and John Woodcock, to name just three.

Clearly it is a sensitive subject, but it was not one I had really considered when I made my decision to leave Leicestershire and join Today. I did not feel any hostility directed at me when I set off for England’s 1990–91 tour of Australia with my new colleagues from the national press, but it is fair to assume that not all of them would have been rooting for me. It was while I was flying from London to Perth that another of those fortuitous events occurred. Christopher Martin-Jenkins, who apart from a five-year break in the early 1980s had been the BBC cricket correspondent since Johnners retired in 1972, announced back in London that this tour would be his last for the BBC. He had decided to follow the path of his great mentor, E. W. Swanton, and join the Daily Telegraph the following summer. This made little or no impact on me at the time, because I did not know Chris very well, and besides, I was entirely focused on my new career at Today. After all, the newspaper had taken quite a gamble in taking me on, and, comfortably settled in my business-class seat, I felt very grateful for the opportunity of a new and exciting career in cricket journalism.

Working for a national tabloid was a challenge, and there was fierce competition amongst the pack of journalists I met on this first tour. Although the broadsheets have changed their approach in the last ten years, and their writers are now expected to report more of what happens off the field than they used to, there is still not the same pressure in that world as there is among the tabloid corres -pondents. Lurid headlines, which are written in the offices in London rather than by the journalist on the tour, are often very damaging indeed, and can seriously affect relations between the players and the media. It soon became clear to me that a tabloid journalist needs a thick skin to survive. The press conferences on that tour were not as controlled as they are today, and it was interesting to see how the same quote from a player or coach would be interpreted differently by the various correspondents. They were brilliant at gently nudging their interviewee in a certain direction by pre-planned questioning, and this often resulted in a response that had not been thought through properly, and gave us a story to write about. These days the England team’s media relations officer thoroughly briefs his players before they appear in front of the press, and sits at their side throughout the press conference.

Today was very patient with me, and I suspect quite a lot of my early reports were largely rewritten in London. The evenings on tour were interesting, if often rather nerve-racking, because that was when you put your notebook away and did your best to have an enjoyable dinner with your fellow hacks, despite being in fierce competition with one another. Inevitably the talk would get round to what we had written that day, as if we were all gingerly testing each other out. As an apprentice newshound, it was always a relief to have it confirmed that I had accurately assessed what the story of the day was.