SPECTATOR SPORT
Getting the message
Frank Keating
THE SINGLE shot rang out around elevenses on Monday morning. It came from the neat study of a bijou town house in a trim West London suburb. Behind the closed door, on the desk, was a half-full bottle of Noilly Prat, a still smoking pearl- handled revolver, the 1993 first-class bat- ting and bowling averages (top-heavy with Australians), and that morning's Daily Tele- graph folded at a column by Mark Nicholas, cricket captain of Hampshire and occasion- al journalist. The television was still on. As the gunshot was heard, as a pipe-opener to the live transmission which would show the imminent death-twitch of another England team in a Test match, the ten best catches of the Ashes series so far illuminated the screen. Every single one of them was taken by an Australian fieldsman.
Ted Dexter took a final slug — and then did the decent thing. Looking on the bright side at the very last, he probably reckoned that a single plain little bullet into the tem- ple would be preferable after the years of peppering his own instep with dum-dum bullets at press conferences. He knew the obituarists would mirthfully parade as pan- egyrics his litany of gaffes — most of them unconsidered and well-meaning excuses for his teams — from 'smog in Calcutta' to 'the Juxtaposition of Mars and Venus'. He realised, too, that he had become to the players and the public an embodiment of that figure of fun, Mr Randolph Churchill, of whom, when he rolled out of the Ritz one afternoon, a passing little girl had enquired earnestly, `Mummy, what exactly is that man for?'
To be sure, what exactly was the chair- man of 'the England Committee and Selec- tors' for? One trusts the Suits of St John's Wood will ask themselves that before rush- ing to vote for another crony. With Ather- ton's new broom a captain's sweeping pow- ers should be restored.
Monday's article by Mark Nicholas (Douglas' to the circuit, as in Jardine) was a last desperate plea for Ted to stay his hand and leave the revolver in the drawer. It was a spirited attack on the press witch- hunt and a defence of Dexter's regime whose 'decent foundations crumbled like digestive biscuits in an investigation unpar- alleled in modern sport'. Too late, for friend Ted was already distractedly polish- ing the mother-of-pearl. Oh, for happier days, sighed Nicholas, dredging up all of 91 years. 'In 1902, the selectors omitted Fry, Jessop, and Barnes from the fourth Test against Australia. Had there been a media to speak of, today's rules would have ensured a war.'
Though headlines might have been small- er, the press at the turn of the century was, by a distance, more bilious and bitchy than today's. It was a concerted press campaign that forced the selectors (Lord Hawke, H.W. Bainbridge, and the Middlesex cap- tain Macgregor) to drop Fry — not only because CB was combining Test match duties with a daily column attacking the selectors in the Daily Express, but also because his batting average for the first three Tests was only 1.66 runs. Barnes was dropped 'for disciplinary reasons' because he'd turned up 20 minutes late for the pre- vious Test at Sheffield, his place in the field having been temporarily taken by the York- shireman, Schofield Haigh, but it was noticed and front-paged by a reporter. Jessop had to go when the captain, MacLaren, made public the letter that Jessop had written to him saying he would bat but not bowl — 'it would perhaps be wiser if they chose some- one better able to fill the bill than myself. (Luckily for England, he was restored, as a batsman, for the next game at The Oval.)
Lord Hawke lasted ten years as chairman (twice as long as Dexter). He finally got the message in 1909 when the press staked out his London home, demanding resignation. `Sorry, gentlemen,' said the butler, 'his Lordship is recuperating his health in the waters of Aix-les-Bains.'
Lord Ted should have thought of that one.
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