David Gower (Text Only). David Gower

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ