at the time was a certain G. Boycott.
The winter of 1979/80 should have been feeding time for Beefy again, with a short tour to Australia followed by a one-match trip to Bombay for the Indian Golden Jubilee Test. Sadly, the Aussies had got their act together after the Packer defections and despite my haul of 11 wickets in the first Test at Perth, they won by 138 runs. The next game at Sydney was going to be won by the side calling right when it came to the toss, which the Australians did.
At this point our lack of success was causing a bit of friction within the camp, and unsurprisingly Boycott was again in the thick of it. The pitch was clearly going to favour the bowlers and Boycs didn’t fancy it at all. His reluctance to put himself in the firing line almost provoked the normally mild mannered Mike Brearley into thumping him. The pitch at the Sydney Cricket Ground was in a terrible state: it was saturated after two and a half days of rain and it didn’t take a genius to work out that it was going to be a quick flyer. Boycs took one look at it and started complaining about his neck being stiff and how he didn’t think he was going to be able to play. Brears had his doubts and sent him off to the nets, where he looked in good enough health to us. Finally, he went up to Brears and announced: ‘I’m not playing. My neck’s still sore’.
Brears saw red; he was literally shaking with rage and I thought for a moment he was going to belt him. Eventually, Boycott was forced to play but we lost the match and with it the three-match series. Other players on that tour had played on through pain and injury, but it seemed that at the first sign of a pitch he didn’t fancy, in my opinion Boycs had tried to jump ship. As far as many of us were concerned, that was the last straw. If Boycs was going to pick and choose his games, he could go and play with himself. I for one didn’t go out of my way to talk to him again on that trip. By the time the third game arrived, it was all over for us, even though Graham Gooch hit 99 before running himself out with his maiden Test century in sight and I scored an undefeated 119 in the second innings.
Before flying to India we made a conscious decision to enjoy ourselves come what may. Bearing in mind the difficulty obtaining decent beer on the sub-continent, we dumped as much of our clothing as we could to make room in our bags for supplies, and then we went out and bought up virtually the entire stock of the local Australian grog.
I had never been there before so I was in for a huge culture shock. It may have been a shortish stay but I soon came to appreciate that this was a thrilling and magnificent country. ‘Deadly’ Derek Underwood, my room-mate, had seen it all before, though there were the odd occasions when even he was taken by surprise. Take, for example, our first night in the Taj Mahal hotel, when he put my smart blue leather shoes outside the bedroom door for cleaning … and that was the last I saw of them! I expect they are still in service all these years later.
There was a lot of unwinding to do after the tensions of the previous five months. Off the field, Deadly was collaborating with his ghost writer Chris Lander on a book but not getting very far. Poor Deadly, he wanted some peace and quiet in order to finish it once and for all, but of course if Lander came to our room, we ended up chatting and drinking to all hours with the result that no work would be done. Then they tried to beat me at my own game by going off to Lander’s suite, but I soon became bored on my own. So I joined them – with the same result.
On more than one occasion I dragged them up to the French restaurant at the top of the hotel. One evening, Deadly became so intoxicated that he started imagining he was on the dance floor and began gyrating on the table where some unfortunate Indian couple were trying to eat their meal. At this point I decided it was time to make a tactical withdrawal. The following morning I went to see the manager of the hotel and asked him if he knew whose meal we had disturbed. He told me and I immediately arranged for them to be sent tickets for the Test match as a form of apology. It turned out to be one of the best moves of my career, because from then on nothing was too much trouble for him.
This was the trip where I really got to know Lander, who was later to become an essential member of the Leukaemia Walk team. It was also the tour where he picked up the nickname ‘Crash’, which came about when Deadly and Lander tried another dodge to avoid me and settle down to work on the book. One night they disappeared up to the hotel penthouse suite where a female entertainer was providing the cabaret in the bar. They reasoned that I would never think of looking for them in the bar if I thought they were working. Bad planning, boys. After a few ‘soft drinks’ (orange juice laced with something a bit special) Lander was flying. Somehow he ended up on the stage, performing the original Karaoke in front of an audience that took a long time to warm up but, once they had, were quite ecstatic. Then, suddenly, the full impact of the drink took its toll.
I’ve heard of singers like Tom Jones walking into the audience to meet his fans. Crash took rather more direct action: he slipped and fell head first into them. Hence the nickname was born.
I managed to do some more damage to him later on tour. One night during the Test match we went back to his room armed with a couple of bottles of brandy and ordered up some tandoori chicken from the kitchen. Suitably prepared for a memorable feast, we got ourselves comfortable and settled back for an evening in front of the television. But on switching it on and despite fiddling for what seemed like an age with the controls, we couldn’t get a decent reception, and in my frustration I hurled a chicken bone at the screen. The bone missed and instead hit the wall behind and bounced off it, before lodging itself in the back of the set, at which point, almost miraculously, the television started working again.
It was a good night and we had a few laughs, but as the television programmes made no sense I decided to take on the job of entertainments officer. I set Crash and Deadly a challenge: standing on the table, they had to drink some brandy, eat the tandoori chicken and read a passage from the Gideon Bible at the same time. Not surprisingly, they failed miserably in this task.
The next morning Crash woke up to find he had spent the night with several pieces of chicken. With head throbbing, he struggled across the room to turn on the television in order to watch the cricket before falling back on his bed. He was meant to be covering the game but was too ill to get there, and this was the best he could do.
He couldn’t believe his eyes. For the England bowler he saw running in and taking a wicket with the first ball of the day was yours truly! The next thing he saw was smoke rising from behind the set. He shot across the room to find a plate load of tandoori chicken simmering away gently in the back of the telly. I can’t imagine how it got there.
In fact, my performance in the match – a century and 13 wickets – probably secured for me the job of England captain once we returned home for the summer series with the West Indies. Little did the selectors know what had been behind it.
All in all, the events of the past three years had been quite an introduction to Test cricket. One thing for which I will always be grateful is that during those extraordinary times on and off the field, Mike Brearley was around when I needed him. I firmly believe that if circumstances had been different, lessons I learned from him would have helped me become a successful England captain.
As it turned out, I was an unsuccessful England captain.
I didn’t go out of my way to get the job of England captain. It was my belief that I was more than capable of rising to the task, but I never really thought I would have a chance of proving it. In the event, I did get that chance and although England failed to win a Test while I was in charge, in my view I did a fairly decent job.
My sadness was that once I had lost the England captaincy I knew I would never get it back again, the reason being that those who wished to prove that the captaincy affected my performance were given all the evidence they needed during
