The first Ashes Test begins this Friday. Former England captain Mike Brearley recalls this specific kind of cricket animal
Vulture Street, Brisbane: an aptly-named location for the start of an England tour.
Wherever one finds it, a hostile sporting crowd embodies the stuff of nightmares. Batting or bowling, the player does his best. And what greets the best?
Derision, hatred, and pleasure at his discomfiture. Rarely in everyday life are such jeering figures from the unconscious, such cruel creatures of the nether world, so vividly or so crudely brought to life.
Few sporting contests match those between Australia and England, especially when they are in Australia, and especially for the Ashes (which begins next week), in the unremitting level of harshness. A particular colonial history, of penal cruelties, or rough realities, of the class-ridden nature of English cricket, have combined to make cricket a nicely concentrated occasion for an intensity of rivalry in which mockery and public ridicule find full scope.
This is not new. In 1937 Cardus wrote of the first Test at Brisbane the previous year, that Australia’s innings began in “a violent atmosphere soon the sky was split by noise; it was gladiatorial; I expected the lions and the Christians But heavens what a game this cricket is in Australia – what a battleground, not to say shambles – is made of a cricket field; how shall I greet the green peacefulness next year of Worcester and Horsham?
“I love the grandeur of Test matches in Australia, the strain and the power, but I am a man of peace, and this is war.” Australia under Bradman came back from 2-0 down to win 3-2.
But my guess is that the crowds in Australia, as elsewhere, have become more mindless, more anonymous in their baying. During the Bodyline series in 1933/4 it was still possible to hear over the missile- throwing and chanting the wonderful remark, “Hey Jardine, you leave our flies alone,” when the extraordinary Jardine, who had himself gone down to fine leg to take the full brunt of the hostility at Adelaide, slapped his neck.
By the time I played there, in 1977, there was little space, amidst the “kill, kill, kill” chanted in time with Lillee’s run-up, for wit.
A couple of years later, when we came to Sydney 2-1 up, and I opened the batting after speculation that I would leave myself out of the team as Denness had done four years before, I did pick out from the general noise the comment: “Breely, you make Denness look like Bradman.” But this was a depleted tour of the Packer period, and the atmosphere lacked its usual intensity.
It was during this tour that the Australian cricketing authorities, alarmed at the behaviour of the raucous section of the fans, took the draconian decision to limit the maximum number of bottles of beer that each person could bring to the grounds to 24.
A year later, in 1979/80, cacophony was back with a vengeance. I was seen by the man on the Sydney street, or hill, as the embodiment of all that’s bad in the English. I talked too much, and too glibly, and with the wrong accent. And when they had a go at me in the field I ignored them, like the stuck-up Pom they knew I was. My beard, grown to combat abrasiveness, led to my nickname – Ayatollah; it struck them as archaic and foreign.
Some Australians seemed to confuse me with my predecessor above, whose response during the Melbourne Test to a team-mate’s suggestion that he go off for treatment for a shin from which blood was seeping out over his boots was; “What! And let 90000 convicts know I’m hurt?”
When I pulled in all 10 fielders on the boundary for the last ball of England’s first ever day-night match, against West Indies at Sydney, wicketkeeper Bairstow was struck in the back by a refilled beer-can.
I could no longer blame outfielders such as Boycott or Willis for wandering in to get out of range, or signing autographs to keep the crowds friendly.
Oddly, the roars of boos (and booze) that greeted me whenever I stepped on to the field at Sydney or Melbourne only energised me. The fact is that crowds affect players for the worse only when they are already inwardly unsure of their right to be there.
Then their taunting feels like an immense intensification of the inner voices which undermine more insidiously and silently.
And it would be wrong to think that all there is to Australian crowds is malice. Much of the hubbub is an invitation to react, preferably with vulgar humour, of which Greig was an extrovert master.
Tufnell’s fielding so endeared him to sections of the “outer” that banners appeared proclaiming the “Phil Tufnell Fielding Academy”. And there is a refreshing directness in the responses of Australian crowds, none of the unpleasant insincerity of some English county grounds, where the surface politeness turns nasty when things go against the home team.
Nor are most Australians proud of the element of okker mindlessness in their citizenry. Many come up to apologise after play, they sidle up, furtively, to wish us luck, especially in the most Anglophile of Antipodean cities, Adelaide.
There is one consolation if we lose: we will have caused great pleasure on the other side of the world. And virtues gather only around flesh that is dying.