M Nicholas: Farewell Gatt, and thanks for the memories (21 Sep 1998)

21 September 1998

Farewell Gatt, and thanks for the memories

By Mark Nicholas

THAT'S it then for Gatt. After 25 years in county cricket, a monumental 551 matches and more than 36,000 first-class runs which have included 94 hundreds, Mike Gatting has taken his final curtain call. Probably.

I say probably, because he is an ever-optimistic never-say-die sort of good egg who may yet pop up somewhere, see his beloved Middlesex a man short, slip on the whites and cream another hundred. And then, with five to go, he will talk his way into a game against Oxbridge, plead a knock against New Zealand and earn a stay of execution on a day that we thought was done.

He says not though, says that he has enjoyed it all hugely and that he is ready now to concentrate on selecting England teams and sorting out the young players at Middlesex. He whispers that he might play the odd second XI game but only in a paternal role, absolutely not for his own ends.

We shall assume then that a cracking, if at times controversial career is over and we will remember it well. This is a man who has given his soul for cricket, whose extraordinary enthusiasm and irresistible spirit helped bring glory upon his county, and, all too briefly, upon his country too.

The Middlesex team will miss him more than they know - are missing him already in truth - much as England did when he was dumped as captain 10 years ago last June. What a botch of a thing that was, sacking a man for having a party. He should, of course, have been dismissed for the unseemly business with Shakoor Rana a few months earlier - even he would tell you that now - but instead the hypocrites at headquarters gave him and each of his team a bonus of £1,000 for something or other, though no one knew what; for silence perhaps.

After that, and the trivia in Nottingham which followed, two attempts to reinstate him as captain were overruled and by the end of the 1980s a previously uncomplicated, much admired and fun-filled sportsman had become so suspicious, so bitter about all things England that he fell foul of seduction by the South African rand and its consequences. It was a desperate tour, unfinished, yet one which should not have begun, though Gatting will tell you good came from it, that it hastened South Africa's process of unification.

Which is Gatt really - a man who sees the best of things and people in life, a man of simple tastes and honest values, a streetwise and straight-talking bloke with a lion's heart?

This is the man who retained the Ashes with a team that "couldn't bat, bowl, or field" and went on to win both one-day tournaments of that tour too. The man who made a brilliant, signature hundred in the MCC bicentenary match at Lord's and shone in the company of Greenidge and Gavaskar, Marshall and Hadlee. The man who tumbled at mid-on to catch Dennis Lillee in the final heart-stopping moments of Headingley 1981; the man who gorged himself on the Indian bowling of 1984 and catalysed that amazing against-the-odds series win under David Gower; the man who led Middlesex to title after title by uniting the most diverse characters in the most combative dressing room in the land. For ever it seems there has been Gatt, never quite a superstar but always his footprint solidly made in the cause of his team.

'I can't imagine being without cricket, it's pretty addictive you know," he says - and, as with all forms of addiction, it has not always served him well, for it has been spiked by the tendency to self-destruct. The pad-ups, two of them to Malcolm Marshall at Lord's in 1984 which questioned his quality as an international batsman; the reverse-sweep in the 1987 World Cup final in India which cast aspersion on his sanity; and then, fancy it being him to receive that ball from Shane Warne.

Because of the various dramas it is possible that memories of Gatting will linger as much for a row with an umpire and a supposed, but utterly unproved, romp with a barmaid, as for his deep-rooted patriotism, his commitment to all things cricket and his bagful of trophies. The vast majority, however, will understand his addiction and applaud it, knowing that if a man doesn't care he may as well not bother.

Gatting cared all right, indeed he cared so much that he almost burst with his high-octane levels of emotion and devotion. For that, in an age of increasing indifference to cricket, we should thank him. Than him for wearing his heart on his sleeve and for allowing us to share all he had got. Thank you, Gatt, and farewell. For now.

Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)