David Gower (Text Only). David Gower

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

CHAPTER FOUR

       On the piste and on safari

      FROM early childhood through to adulthood (some might say semi-adulthood) cricket has been the dominant feature of my life, and most of the things I’ve done have stemmed directly from the game. However, I have always tried to ensure that cricket does not take over my life completely, and there have been times when I have had to get right away from it to preserve a degree of sanity. Getting right away from it by taking to the air in the middle of a match was perhaps an extreme example, and in terms of career advancement, not a very wise one. I bumped into my old cricket master from King’s School, Canterbury, during a county game last summer, a lovely chap by the name of Colin Fairservice who would be well into his eighties by now. He brought up the Tiger Moth business and said, ‘The trouble with you, David, is that you’ve never grown up.’ I don’t think this is entirely true, but I guess this is how most people perceive me, and I would have to own up for supplying a certain amount of evidence to this school of thought.

      I have developed many outside interests, enjoying them both for what they are and as a partial antidote to cricket. You cannot get much further away from a cricketing environment than snow, and winter sports have figured prominently in my more energetic leisure pursuits. I first went skiing at the age of ten, when my parents took me to Switzerland, but it was another twenty years before I had my first serious go at it. I had become very close friends with a keen social skier and bobsledder by the name of Simon Strong, having met him through Allan Lamb, and one year the three of us and our respective ladies took ourselves off to the resort of Verbier. It was a somewhat painful introduction to the sport, largely because our hosts had booked lunch at a place situated at the bottom of one of the more demanding slopes at the resort. It was certainly not for novices, and having made most of the trip on arse and elbow, the wine was consumed СКАЧАТЬ