Rory Brewer: Scores of cliches for a bored fan (6 September 1997)

Saturday 6 September 1997

Scores of clich`es for a bored fan

By Rory Bremner

AND SO another cricket season draws to a close, with an early autumnal dampness in the air and dew on the ground.

For the England side, this year was by no means a dis- aster, although the thumping highs of Edgbaston and the Oval were matched by equally dispiriting lows in between. While much was made of the absence of Reiffel and Gillespie in the Australian side for the last Test, let`s not forget that England too lost at key times Gough and Cork (through injury) and Caddick (through a hole in selector David Graveney`s brain, since repaired.)

And there were champagne moments - champagne afternoons, in fact: Hussain and Thorpe at Edgbaston, Tufnell at the Oval, Ben Hollioake blazing on to the scene in the one-day international at Lord`s (how long ago that seems now). We are very similar, in a sense: Hollioake is a brilliant one-day cricketer, and I hope to be a brilliant cricketer one day.

But the sad reflection remains: if you had to select a joint England/Australia side, you would struggle to include one English player. Gough? Thorpe? Atherton? It`s a tough one.

I`m glad Mike Atherton stayed on as captain, though, not least because the Daily Mail, amongst others, had already made up his mind for him and announced `Atherton to quit` in an inspired, collector`s item piece of speculative tosh.

The Ditching of the England Captain had become a ritual, like the Trooping of the Colour or the Changing of the Guard. Let`s not forget it was Allan Border whose side suffered galling defeat in 1985 and Allan Border - whose tenacity and stubborness Atherton shares - who led them back to regain the Ashes in 1989. No one would seek sweeping changes to the current side, and this year may well have been the baptism of fire needed to turn a good side on paper into a winning one on grass. Besides, who would have bet against a new captain facing cries to resign if things went mango-shaped in the Caribbean this winter? Not my bookies. But then the regular reader of this column already knows all about them.

Some lamented the lack of another spin bowler to com- plement Tufnell in the last Test. Maybe we should have had an off-spin option, preferably one who could bat a bit. Apparently there`s a reasonable bat who bowls the occasional off-spin down in Worcestershire called G A Hick. Anyone heard of him?

If the cricket gets boring this winter, which, it must be said, is about as unlikely as Fred Trueman opening a web site on the Internet ("E-mail? `Appens that`s what we used to say when t`postman arrived!"), I`m in the process of inventing a new game for spectators. As you sit and watch, listen carefully to the people around you: you know, the ones with the coolbox and the Tetley sunhat.

Each cricketing clich that you hear fall from their unfortunate lips will earn you runs in strict accordance with their banal awfulness. Thus: "He`s a useful bits-and-pieces player" gets you two; "So-and-so`s a great striker of the ball" or "X gives it a real tweak" might stretch to three, but the really great ones like "a useful knock" and "no need to chase that" will race to the boundary and keep the score ticking over nicely without the need to rotate the strike or get into a diarrhoea finish at the death.

Wrong names, as gloriously described in Marcus Berk- mann`s book Rain Men, ("He`s a useful player, that Alan Hollioake") are good for singles and the brilliant "God, I reckon I could face this guy, he`s such a useless pr . . . BOWLED `IM! What a great delivery!" is of course a straight six over the bowler`s head. Must be. Great strike. No need to chase that, etc.

THE England captain`s body language has, let`s face it, not always been in his favour. In the course of compiling my BBC cricket show, we considered alternative songs for players to go out to bat to, `a la Australian day-night games. After Boycott (Me Myself I) and Devon Malcolm (It`s a Wide World) we head inevitably to Atherton: Heaven Knows I`m Miserable Now by the Smiths.

But truth has a habit of being stranger than fiction: if you ever ring up the English Cricket Board, as I had to, to speak to their brilliant and unflappable liaison officer, you may be put on hold and subjected to the strains of the ECB switchboard`s `call waiting` tune: Some day he`ll come along, that man of mine, and he`ll be big and strong . . . It`s true, I swear.

In preparation for the show I read Robert Winder`s ex- cellent account of the last World Cup, Hell for Leather. He subsequently reminded me of an Eton v Harrow match reported in an old Wisden where some Harrovian scored 230 or so, about 228 of which were to the midwicket boundary. When the Eton captain was asked afterwards why he hadn`t put a man out there earlier, he replied that he was "lulling the batsman into a false sense of security".

It was good having Marcus and Harry Thomson, originator of Have I Got News For You and They Think It`s All Over, on our production team. Sadly, pressure of time meant we couldn`t perform a Boycott-through-the-ages sketch where a Victorian Boycott tested the wicket with a starting-handle. We may yet deliver the ultimate challenge to the MacLaurin proposals on the future of English Cricket: if we really want to play like the Australians, why not have a system of two teams, each with 11 Australians, and play the games in Australia between October and March? At least then we might produce some great strikers of the ball.

`It`s Just Not Cricket with Rory Bremner` is on BBC2 at 11.50pm tomorrow.

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