Travels and tribulations

John Woodcock, who has seen over 400 Test matches since 1951, reflects on 45 years of touring and compares today's hectic tours with those of a more leisured age

John Woodcock at work before an inquisitive audience in Bhawalpur whilst covering England's 1977-78 tour of Pakistan. © Getty Images

It is probably as well that the leading cricketers of today can have little idea of what they are missing when they go on tour. They no longer have time to smell the flowers: they just see them from the air or from the bus on the way to the ground.

The change to a different, much quicker tempo came in the 1960s. My first four MCC tours to Australia, between 1950-51 and 1962-63, as well as the first to South Africa, in 1956-57, began and ended with a sea voyage. In 1950-51 we were away for all but seven months - from September 14 until April 9. It is not only in the cricket world that things have changed: a few days after getting home in 1951, I went to Wembley as one of an all-ticket crowd of 100,000, to see Pegasus, the old blues of Oxford and Cambridge, win the FA Amateur Cup. Today the Amateur Cup and Pegasus are both long gone.

From Tilbury to Fremantle, the port for Perth, comprised three and a half carefree, convivial, luxurious weeks, much of them spent listening to Neville Cardus. `Come along now,' he would say after dinner, I've got two deck chairs, two cigars and two glasses of port, and there are things I want to tell you. Don't go and waste your time dancing.' He became a wonderfully warm-hearted friend.

To get round the crescent from Perth to Brisbane for the First Test match took another six and a half weeks. In 1950 Freddie Brown's team had been away for 74 days by the time the Test series started. For the long night flight across the Nullarbor Plain from Perth to Adelaide those in first-class took to their bunks. After hiring a car in Adelaide four of us - Jim Swanton, the Robertson-Glasgows (`Crusoe' and Elizabeth) and myself - drove from match to match, though the roads between the capital cities then were nothing like a the highways they are now.

Others, happy to miss the up-country matches, might board a liner and sail from - Melbourne to Sydney or from Sydney to Brisbane. There were no wives or creches, no One-Day Internationals, no sponsors, no floodlights, no quotes, no television interviews, or slow-motion replays, and very few press conferences.

Sundays were sacrosanct - reserved for church, golf and reflective comment. The press box chuckled along with Arthur Mailey and Clarrie Grimmett and Bill O'Reilly and Bert Oldfield and Jack Fingleton and Johnny Moyes and Alan Fairfax and Harold Larwood and Bill Bowes and `Crusoe' and Sid Barnes, Ray Robinson's `artful dodger' and the contributor of an irreverential column (called Like It Or Lump It) to a Sydney paper, who would say to Cardus `You put a carbon in for me today, Neville, and I'll do the same for you tomorrow'. It was a more relaxed, more trusting, less intrusive, less commercial world than today's. The glare of publicity was nothing like so bright.

Even in 1965 it was written into the contracts of the South African team to England that at no time during the tour should their wives be "within 5,000 miles" of the British Isles. But the combination of jet travel, conjugal power and multiplying tours was bringing to an end such restrictions and restraints.

In the 1950s only Australia, West Indies and South Africa were thought to merit a full England side, and even then Alec Bedser, still England's premier bowler, was advised against going to the Caribbean in 1953-54, so as to recharge his batteries after a hard season in England. He had just taken 39 wickets at 17 apiece in the Test series with Australia and was told by Sir Pelham Warner that he would just as well put up those trusty old feet and stay at home.

Come the 1970s, by when scarcely a winter was allowed to pass without a `major' tour, the players were starting to be joined by their families, maybe for the Christmas holidays. To get to South Africa today takes not 14 days as it did when I first went there, but 14 hours, so that England's `touring party' in Cape Town at the start of this year, including players, managers, medicos, mothers, babies, girlfriends, nannies and grannies, numbered a teeming 64. Is it any wonder that in the Test match there Ray Illingworth felt some of the England players lacked the application required of them?

On the same tack, there were at that Newlands match no fewer than 13 of the 27 past and present England captains who are alive today, several of them out to make an impression in their new and awkward roles as instant critics. This alone put Michael Atherton under the sort of scrutiny unknown to any of his predecessors.

The pressures of the captain's job very nearly kept Len Hutton out of the crucial Third Test match in Australia in 1954-55 just as it contributed to the illness which brought about May's early withdrawal from the West Indies in 1959-60; and Hutton and May were blessed not with a one-horse attack, as Atherton is, but with ones that won matches for them. In a word, no England touring captain ever had so much to put up with, on or off the field, as England's present incumbent. It is bound to take its toll of him, however resilient and impervious he may seem.

Having done it for so long and so often, I miss the anticipation which comes from studying time tables, and the thrill of climbing gangways, and the fun of being with friends and colleagues and splendid cricketers, all sharing the same high hopes. When I was of an age with the players and England had a good side and the omnivorous, calamitous, corrosive Mr Packer was still in short trousers, and one had `world enough and time', following the sun with MCC was a wonderful life, the most coveted in sports journalism. Now, though, it is too hectic to be enjoyed in the same way. It is still a privilege to be chosen for a tour, whether as a player or a writer, but the journalists' careers are shorter than they were. There is more talk of burnout than there ever was.It is not possible any more just to report the cricket: there is too much politics in the game for that.

To cover the recent World Cup in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka it was as necessary to be a newsman and a gypsy as a cricket correspondent. Cardus and `Crusoe' would have had none of it; the artistry of Hutton would have been compromised. Like the game itself, touring today, I am afraid, is but an imitation of what it was - and only a fairly attractive one at that.

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