Free Cricket XXXX Cricket by Frances Edmonds Page B

fairness, it must be granted, that this ‘talk back’ school of reporting often lifts chunks out of context, usually the most controversial and scurrilous chunks, and does a cut-and-paste job that is ideally designed to precipitate intercontinental aggro of mega proportions.
    The
London Evening Standard’s
cricket correspondent, John Thicknesse, had apparently filed a piece on the Somerset County Cricket Club’s ritual bloodletting. The Somerset Committee, for a variety of reasons (many of which will probably never be fully comprehended unless or until captain Peter Roebuck releases his own deeply disturbing chronicle of events), decided to dispense with the services of West Indians Viv Richards and Joel Garner, and to enlist the services of New Zealander Martin Crowe instead. Far be it from me, a mere woman, to involve myself in the purely cricketing rationale of this move. Indisputably, Viv Richards is one of the world’s finest batsmen, and Joel Garner still a splendid fast bowler. The fact remains, nevertheless, that despite the presence of these two West Indians and Ian Botham, the Somerset team has been doing very poorly. There is talk that the triumvirate of superstars was a clique within the dressing room, and an influence in many ways deleterious to young, suggestible county players. Lest I start involving Heinemann in yet another mammoth legal battle however, suffice it to say that one fact remains beyond the shadow of a doubt. Superstars who may well perform miracles to packed crowds in the international arena are not necessarily as liable to give their all on a wet Sunday afternoon playing Glamorgan at Swansea. I rest my case, and await with interest the evidence of my learned Cambridge legal colleague, Mr Roebuck.
    Botham, upon hearing of his two mates’ dismissal, immediately tendered his resignation to boot. This was perceived by many of the public to be a loyal and generous course of action. Considering that the Somerset Committee had stood by Botham while he was suspended for nearly an entire seasonfor drugs offences, it is perhaps difficult to decide where primary loyalty should lie. Whatever the merits of the case, supporters’ groupings were quickly mustered on both sides, and the resultant civil war made the Yorkshire County Cricket Club/Boycott issue look like a High Commission cocktail party. The internecine strife has become so ugly that in a press conference here in Australia Botham has warned Roebuck (who will be arriving in Brisbane to cover the tour for
The Sunday Times
of London, and
The Sydney Morning Herald
) that he would be safer staying at home. Phil says that kind of totally unveiled threat is all ‘piss in the wind’ (I’ve noticed, incidentally how the level of Phil’s concepts, conversation and metaphors plummets when he has spent more than two weeks in the egregious intellectual company of a touring team), but I am not so sure. Peter would probably, in any event, be well advised to give Botham a very wide berth. Since childhood I have always been physically frightened of people whose bodyweight in kilos is numerically higher than their IQ.
    In his piece Thicknesse had branded Botham a boorish bully, which is about as original an observation as roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet and Mike Gatting likes cheese and pickle sandwiches. It was, if I am not much mistaken, virtually the same expression used by the
Mail’s
brilliant roving, award-winning correspondent Ian Wooldridge, and by Phil’s biographer and
The Times
correspondent Simon Barnes in Trinidad last year, and the consequent eruptions were not dissimilar. On this occasion it was not Botham’s ghostwriter from the
Sun
who showed him the ex libris Thicknesse snippets. For it often seems that some reporters deliberately goad the mercurial Beefy into doing things, saying things, and overreacting to things in order to provide good tabloid copy. This time it must have been some other either deliberately