Free Can Anyone Hear Me? by Peter Baxter Page B

with a festival game at Lilac Hill in a Perth suburb, the home of the Midland Guildford club, where sponsors’ tents round the boundary make for an apparently relaxed atmosphere, belying the determination of whatever scratch XI has been put together to embarrass the Poms. The first of these fixtures came on the 1990–91 England tour, two days after a rather calamitous start at another Perth club.
    That was a delightful ground in an affluent suburb – the Melvista Oval. Mobile phones were still not part of our kit then, so the lack of any telephone on the ground had the potential to be slightly problematic. Things became a bit more urgent, though, when Graham Gooch, the captain on that tour, injured his hand, going for a return catch off his own bowling and had to go off to hospital for an X-ray.
Tuesday 23 October 1990
    There was talk of a phone box nearby, but I could find no sign of it. I asked a gardener who was trimming some bushes. ‘People round here have phones in their houses,’ he informed me curtly.
    There was a golf course bordering the cricket ground and so I tried that and found a payphone in the upstairs bar. A ladies’ medal tournament was in full swing, but they seemed happy for me to use their phone and as the Gooch injury scare became the lead item in all the morning sports bulletins, we got to know each other very well.
    ThoughGooch returned to the ground later and the story was rather played down, his wound became infected and he was out of action for a month.
    There was another up-country match before we encountered a major ground on that tour, with England taking on a Western Australian Country XI in Geraldton, about 250 miles north of Perth, where a penetrating gale seemed to blow constantly. One rather novel feature of an otherwise undistinguished place and its cricket ground, Wonthella Park, was the vertical ladder out of the gents’ loo that took me up to the ABC broadcasting point.
    That 1990 tour was probably the last one with a full five weeks’ run-up to the first Test. After leaving Perth, we went to Port Pirie, about 135 miles north of Adelaide, for which journey we crammed four of us and our luggage into a car, stopping en route at a lonely pub called the Dublin Hotel to watch the Melbourne Cup, the race that brings the whole of Australia to a standstill. In an otherwise seemingly deserted cluster of houses the pub was packed with drinkers, all slightly surprised to find four English journalists coming in out of the dust and heat.
    While we were taking the low road, the team had an alarmingly bumpy flight through an electrical storm in a small aircraft. They arrived at the civic dinner (a grand name for generous helpings of beef stroganoff on paper plates) to which we had all been summoned, very late and looking rather shaken.
    On the same tour England had a couple of games against the Australian Cricket Academy at a school ground in Adelaide, in preparation for the one-day series.
Tuesday29 November 1990
    St Peter’s College ground turned out to be more like an English public school idyll than anything actually in England. There were beautiful trees and a small stand at midwicket where the press gathered, the headmaster’s house bordered the ground and there was a comparatively ancient chapel across an adjacent lawn.
    I found a phone in the tuck shop for early morning live reports back home, but they were locking up before the close, so I had to do a rushed return to the hotel in time for 7 a.m. in Britain.
    The following day, the tuck shop and the school switchboard both shut down much earlier and a nearby petrol station had to become my studio. How much easier life became with the advent of mobile phones!
    Tasmania would be aggrieved to be referred to as ‘up-country’. The Bellerive Oval stages Test matches after all, though England have never played one there. When I first went to the island state in 1982, the main Tasmanian Cricket