The Botham Report. Ian Botham

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СКАЧАТЬ allow the game to continue the England management and those at Lord’s had two options. The first was to bend over backwards and bow to whatever demands Shakoor imposed on them, even to the point of forcing Gatting to apologise against his will.

      Coincidentally, the next day, the rest day in the match, was also the occasion of the TCCB winter meeting at Lord’s. Finally, understanding that the efforts of Lush to talk with high ranking Pakistan Board officials had come to nought, they issued the following statement:

       ‘It was unanimously agreed that the current Test match in Faisalabad should restart today after the rest day. The Board manager in Pakistan, Peter Lush, was advised of this decision and asked to take whatever action was necessary to implement it. In reaching their decision the members of the Board recognised the extremely difficult circumstances of the tour and the inevitable frustration for the players arising from those circumstances, but they believe it to be in the long-term interests of the game as a whole for the match to be completed. The Board will be issuing a statement on the tour when it is finished, but in the meantime the chairman and chief executive will be going to Karachi for the final Test next week.’

      Peter Lush read the following statement:

       ‘The Test and County Cricket Board has instructed me as manager of the England team to do everything possible to ensure that this Test match continues today and that we honour our obligations to complete this tour of Pakistan. We have tried to resolve amicably the differences between Mike Gatting and umpire Shakoor Rana following their heated exchange of words which took place on the second day. We all hoped this could have been achieved in private and with a handshake. Umpire Shakoor Rana has stated that he would continue to officiate in this match if he received a written apology from Mike Gatting. The umpire has made it clear he will not apologise for the remarks he made to the England captain. In the wider interests of the game Mike Gatting has been instructed by the Board to write an apology to Shakoor Rana and this he has now done.’

      [viz:

      Dear Shakoor Rana,

      I apologise for the bad language used during the 2nd day of the Test match at Fisalabad [sic].

      Mike Gatting 11 Dec 1987]

      The players had agreed to refuse to carry on if Gatt was forced to apologise but in the end settled for a strong statement of their own, expressing full support for Gatt and their anger at the Board for forcing him to act against his will.

      The second option, which the Board did not take but to my mind should have done, was to tell the players to pack their bags and prepare to come home, while informing the Pakistan Board that unless they put a stop to all this nonsense by instructing Shakoor to issue his apology, they would call off the remainder of the tour.

      Once back in England the Board should quietly have reminded Gatting of his responsibilities and told him that any further breaches of discipline from him and his players would result in the ultimate sanction of suspension.

      The fact that they chose the former rather than the latter option displayed fatal weakness from the men at the top. Their subsequent award of £1,000 to each player as a ‘hardship bonus’ was just a joke. In Australia and New Zealand the players’ behaviour failed to improve. Broad and Graham Dilley were both fined for on-field incidents; on-field dissent often led by Gatting and then later supported by team manager Micky Stewart gave the squad a reputation for surliness they surely deserved.

      From that moment Gatting was dead in the water as captain. Had the selectors made a clean break then England would have been able to approach the 1988 summer series against the West Indies as a fresh start. Gatting himself would have been able to re-focus his thoughts on maintaining his position as the best batsman in the side and the players would have understood the price of poor discipline. Instead, although the Board issued a directive to the selectors to take into account a player’s behaviour as well as his form, Peter May, the chairman of selectors, re-appointed Gatting without a second thought. Such muddled thinking invited disaster.

      And then came Rothley Court. Gatting’s critics had waited eagerly for the slightest opportunity to pile in and, while England were achieving a creditable draw against Viv Richards’ side in the first Test at Nottingham his behaviour at the team’s hotel gave it to them with knobs on.

      The day after the Trent Bridge Test had ended two national tabloids ran stories of a ‘sex orgy’ at Rothley Court involving unnamed players. The next day Gatting was named as one of them and by the afternoon of 9 June he was sacked. Gatting admitted to the selectors that he had invited a woman to his room for a birthday drink but denied any impropriety. The selectors said they accepted Gatting’s version of events, then sacked him anyway. The saga then rumbled on when the Board fined Gatt £5,000 for publishing a chapter on the events of the Pakistan tour in his autobiography Leading From the Front because of the contractual obligation not to comment on recent tours.

      In between times the captaincy issue took on the nature of a game of pass the parcel. John Emburey was appointed for the second and third Tests, although increasingly unsure of his place. Chris Cowdrey, on the strength of Kent’s performances in the Championship, was then given the job when in spite of the fact that while a lovely bloke he resembled a Test match cricketer in name only. Finally, after Cowdrey had been ruled out of the final Test through injury, the selectors turned to Graham Gooch. Twenty-three players were used during the summer series. England lost 4–0. It was all a total fiasco. From Ashes winners eighteen months earlier England ended the summer of 1988 as the laughing stock of world cricket.

      There was more, much more, to come, starting with the cancellation of England’s 1988 winter tour to India.

TWO

       TED LORD AND HIS BRAVE NEW WORLD

       ‘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 СКАЧАТЬ