Cricket Beyond the Bazaar by Mike Coward

Author:Mike Coward
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781743432150
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2014-04-27T16:00:00+00:00

The scoreline was not as bleak but the unhappy tour revived memories in many minds of Kim Hughes’ helpless party six years earlier which stumbled from as far north as Sialkot, by way of Lahore, Faisalabad, Multan and Hyderabad, to Karachi in the south. A fair assessment of their misses in three Tests was 21 and hardly surprisingly they had the ignominy of being the first Australian team whitewashed on the subcontinent, when Pakistan completed their only clean sweep of a series since being awarded Test match status in 1952.

If there is a correlation between clean, sharp catching and the state of mind of the fieldsman, Hughes’s team at least was able to present evidence in mitigation to its accusers around the board table at the ACB offices in Melbourne. For theirs was the last Australian tour of a style more familiar to Benaud than to Border. It was not primitive, but by the west’s soft middle-class standards it was basic and challenging. Unconvinced about the cleanliness and suitability of kitchens at the Sinbad Hotel in Multan, the Hotle (as a sign declared) Ripple at Faisalabad and the Hedamala Guest House outside Sialkot, Hughes’ Australians seconded a team of chefs and kitchen hands from the fine Intercontinental Hotel establishment in Lahore. The wisdom of that decision was evident at the Ripple and the Hedamala where, at the direction of doctor Paul Koenig, the travelling cooks chose to ignore existing kitchen facilities and instead produced memorable and moderately spiced fare on small portable wood or gas stoves in the open. Whenever and wherever possible Koenig, the last medical officer attached to an Australian cricket team, supervised the purchase and the preparation of food to accompany the beer—which came perforce from Australia or from the diplomatic enclave in the capital, Islamabad. Accommodation away from the major centres was spartan with players three, four or more to a room at the Hedamala, which was used as a cantonment whenever tensions mounted on the nearby border with India. The unsettling sense of isolation was heightened at the off-beat establishments with their solitary and generally wonky and unusable telephone line; players uninterested in reading, passive games and trivia and general knowledge quizzes orchestrated by members of the fourth estate were bored to the point of distraction.

As an antidote to boredom Border, Greg Ritchie and his mate, Wayne Phillips, caused mayhem with the liberal and at times indiscriminate use of fireworks procured from one of the bustling bazaars in Old Lahore. Such pranks, some harmless, others not, enabled the players to momentarily consider something other than the privations they believed they were suffering. It was, however, the abject loss of quality cricket which concerned the ACB and it fined Allan Border $600 for breaching his tour agreement by penning a colourful magazine article about the tour.

To an extent the hijinks were a coping mechanism for a team hopelessly out of its class in aptitude and attitude, in an alien and sometimes intimidating environment. The notoriously undisciplined

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