Sex & Drugs & Rebel Tours by David Tossell

Author:David Tossell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pitch Publishing
Published: 2015-03-11T04:00:00+00:00

10

IT’S A HARD LIFE

‘The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world’ – George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

THE George Orwell novel Nineteen Eighty-Four has become known in modern culture for, as much as anything else, the existence of Room 101, the place where victims are confronted by their worst nightmares. By the end of the year that inspired the book most English cricketers would have found their West Indian counterparts occupying that chamber of horror.

Five Tests, five heavy defeats – two by an innings, one by 172 runs and the others by eight and nine wickets – was about as emphatic as you could get and prompted discussion of whether this West Indian team could be ranked alongside the Australian ‘Invincibles’ of 1948 as possibly the greatest team in the sport’s history. The summer even spawned a record, ‘N-N-Nineteen Not Out’, in which impressionist Rory Bremner parodied Paul Hardcastle’s number-one hit, ‘19’. Where Hardcastle used a techno beat and documentary-style commentary to highlight the average age of American soldiers in the Vietnam War, Bremner mimicked a range of BBC commentators to reference the combat zone in which England’s batsmen found themselves and the miserable average – conveniently nineteen exactly – achieved by captain David Gower. YouTube it, kids.

What distinguished this West Indian team was that they were in the middle of their two-decade period of pace-based dominance. Helmets now offered some protection against the fast bowlers but there was still much physical damage inflicted on the way to what was coined as a ‘blackwash’ by the West Indians’ exuberant fans11. The bowlers might only have suffered bruised egos, but the beating they took, such as on the final day at Lord’s in the second Test, left deep scars of a different kind.

As Ian Botham had discovered four years earlier, Gower could not have been offered a tougher introduction to England captaincy. His task appeared as daunting – albeit in a less serious environment – as that of union leader Arthur Scargill, who that spring called out his members on strike in protest at the inexorable erosion of the mining industry. While Scargill’s defeat would be dragged out over a cruel, devastating twelve months, the West Indians administered swift execution. It left no one much the wiser about Gower’s suitability for leadership.

Gower had taken over in full knowledge that public opinion of the team following the lurid tales of the winter was little higher than that of the miners in a typical cricket committee room in the south of England. ‘I recognise that we have lost some of the goodwill of the man in the street,’ he confessed. ‘Application, patience, resolution – that’s what I shall be looking for from my team.’

Patience would also be needed at times by the Test crowds. The West Indies refused to agree to a minimum number of overs per day but, with both teams meandering along at around thirteen and a half per hour, they were no more responsible for

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